What Time Is It?

Screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman + physicist Brian Greene
The creator of time-warping films Synecdoche, New York and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets the famous proponent of string theory to understand how time passes us by. Greene is currently working on a cantata with Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang based on his children’s book Icarus at the Edge of Time, to be premiered at this year’s World Science Festival.
Oscar winning screenwriter and director, Charlie Kaufman, is best know for his work on films The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Adaptation; Synecdoche, New York; and Being John Malkovich. After studying film at NYU, Kaufman worked in the circulation department of the Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, in the late 1980s and moved to Los Angeles in 1991, where he was hired to write for the TV sitcom “Get a Life” (1990). He went on to write comedy sketches and a variety of TV show episodes. Between writing assignments, he wrote the inventive screenplay Being John Malkovich (1999), which launched Kaufman’s fame in Hollywood. In 2004 he won an Oscar for Best Writing for an Original Screenplay for The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and one of the best-known string theorists. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. He has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time and The Fabric of the Cosmos, and a related PBS television special.