Rick Moody + Melissa Franklin

“Nothing is more real than nothing.” –Samuel Beckett
Celebrated American novelist Rick Moody and Harvard physicist Melissa Franklin argue whether Samuel Beckett’s writings can help us understand the relationship between physics and emptiness.

Melissa Franklin is a professor of physics at Harvard University and an experimental particle physicist who has been working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, an experiment designed generally to study the collisions of protons and anti-protons at the highest energies currently possible.
Rick Moody is the author of five novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir, The Black Veil. His most recent work is the novel, The Four Fingers of Death. His forthcoming collection of essays, Discrete Music, will be published in Fall of 2011. He plays guitar and sings in The Wingdale Community Singers, whose most recent release is Spirit Duplicator (2009).