Marcelo Gleiser
Marcelo Gleiser is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. He is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College.
Gleiser is the author of the books The Prophet and the Astronomer (Norton & Company, 2003); The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (Dartmouth, 2005); A Tear at the Edge of Creation (Free Press, 2010); and The Island of Knowledge (Basic Books, 2014). He is a frequent presence in TV documentaries and writes often for magazines, blogs and newspapers on various aspects of science and culture.
He has authored over 100 refereed articles, is a Fellow and General Councilor of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and the National Science Foundation.
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As a species, we can be proud of our remarkable scientific prowess: This is an ongoing effort, a narrative we build slowly, gathering data and ideas that stretch our imagination, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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Once we mix in real science with the possibility of extraterrestrial life, we can learn much about our current dilemmas and, hopefully, about our survival as a species, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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A liberal arts education was supposed to expose students to the sciences and the humanities without exploring their affinities or overlaps — but this era is coming to an end, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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There are lessons to be learned in the false detection of alien signals: Sure, we should keep on listening, but we also should understand our role as guardians of Earth, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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Imagine how sad it would be if, one day, we arrived at the end of knowledge — that would be incomparably worse than embracing doubt as the unavoidable partner of a curious mind, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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Fearing science is not the same as fearing what we are capable of: In the end, it's all really about us, what we can create and what we do with what we create, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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The essence of a constructive dialogue between faith and science is to recognize that we are all in this together — and that our perplexity at being alive is one and the same, says Marcelo Gleiser.
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To start, we can't ever be sure that what we find is the oldest life on Earth. All we can do is to keep looking for possible biomarkers in the oldest rocks around, says astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser.
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If we have the power to create a hypothetical universe in a game like No Man's Sky, we can unleash the human exploratory drive to go where no one has gone before, says astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser.
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Incompleteness is the lifeblood of science. We don't know where the massive neutrinos will lead us, but it's fair to expect that the road ahead will have quite a few surprises, says Marcelo Gleiser.