So the lesson of your new children’s book is to not fly into black holes?
[Laughs] That’s certainly part of the lesson. I think that the larger lesson is that there is a tremendous drama in science that is often not communicated, because science reveals the utterly strange nature of reality that we often don’t experience in everyday life but underlies everything that is out there.

Your books are pretty popular among mainstream audiences. What’re the challenges of writing for both science laypersons and kids?
Well, the challenge is to build a bridge, from everyday experience to the weird and unexpected reality that science has revealed, and to build it in a way that’s compelling and exciting. What I tried to do in this book is build a bridge that even kids can walk across by virtue of placing the science in story context.

Do you think it’s easier for kids to get their heads around ideas like that?
That has certainly been my experience. Kids have a kind of malleability that adults often lose. Kids are willing to take on really strange ideas because, when you’re a kid, everything is strange. And I think the challenge for us as a community, and a civilization, is to prepare kids for the strange reality that science has presented to us. And I think that stories like this can help prepare imaginative young minds.

Do you envision that when your young children start going to school, they’ll get into arguments with other kids about whose dad’s brain is bigger?
[Laughs] I think that they would lose that one.

The Large Hadron Collider is about to start up. Are you science geeks stoked or what?
Hugely exciting time. There hasn’t been a big influx of data from the microscopic realm for a very long time. And this machine is going to open a realm that we’ve never explored before. We have ideas about what we might find, but the most exciting thing is to get something completely unexpected.

I heard that, once started, this thing could form mini black holes. WTF, dude?
Well, there is a chance that this machine could form black holes in collisions, but the chance of that is pretty small. Honestly, even if one does form, the chances of something disastrous happening are fantastically tiny, not worth thinking about further.

You’re from New York; what person or place in the city would you most like to see get sucked into a black hole?
[Laughs] Do you have a multiple choice for that one? I don’t have a good answer. There’s a good answer to that in that the physics department at Columbia is perhaps the ugliest building at the university. Were that to disappear, as long as it were replaced, there would be a certain joy associated with that.

Think fast: What Hollywood actor would play Brian Greene in a feature film?
I’d like to think that David Duchovny would be interested.

That guy is getting into a lot of trouble these days.
Uh, that’s true. Maybe I should revise that. I meant, prior to the sex thing.

String theory needs 11 dimensions to work. Which one has the free beer?
[Laughs] Uh, well, you get the free beer at the H bar. [Awkward silence] That’s a quantum mechanics joke. Here’s the thing: If you manage to get into any of those extra dimensions, I guarantee that I’ll buy you a beer myself.

Greene reads from his new children’s book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, at the Union Square Barnes & Noble Mon 15.

See Previous 1 bold question