Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, where he also serves as the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement.
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Scientists are limited, often failing to see what’s in front of their eyes, but that’s no surprise—they’re only human.
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Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, where he also serves as the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement.
He specializes in cosmology and high energy physics, complexity theory, and astrobiology. His research ranges from cosmology, applications of information theory, and complex phenomena to the history and philosophy of science and how science and culture interact. His books have been published into 15 languages.
Gleiser has been at Dartmouth College since 1991. His undergraduate degree was from the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (1981), followed by a masters degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1982), and a Ph.D. from King's College London (1986). He was a postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab (1986-1988) and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1988-1991).
Gleiser is a fellow and past general councilor of the American Physical Society. He is a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and the National Science Foundation.External
Biological Homochirality and the Search for Extraterrestrial Biosignatures
Discover Life | August | 2022
Most amino acids and sugar molecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other, knowns as enantiomers. However, life on Earth is mostly homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively L-amino acids, while only D-sugars appear in RNA and DNA. The mechanism behind this fundamental asymmetry of life remains unknown, despite much progress in the theoretical and experimental understanding of homochirality in the past decades.
The authors review three potential mechanisms for the emergence of biological homochirality on primal Earth and explore their implications for astrobiology: the first, that biological homochirality is a stochastic process driven by local environmental fluctuations; the second, that it is driven by circularly polarized ultraviolet radiation in star-forming regions; and the third, that it is driven by parity violation at the elementary particle level.
Co-authors: Damian Radosław Sowinski, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Jeremy DeSilva, Adam Frank and Gourab Ghoshal | September | 2022
Agents interacting with their environments, machine or otherwise, arrive at decisions based on their incomplete access to data and their particular cognitive architecture, including data sampling frequency and memory storage limitations. In particular, the same data streams, sampled and stored differently, may cause agents to arrive at different conclusions and to take different actions.
This phenomenon has a drastic impact on polities—populations of agents predicated on the sharing of information. The authors show that, even under ideal conditions, polities consisting of epistemic agents with heterogeneous cognitive architectures might not achieve consensus concerning what conclusions to draw from datastreams. Transfer entropy applied to a toy model of a polity is analyzed to showcase this effect when the dynamics of the environment is known. As an illustration where the dynamics is not known, they examine empirical data streams relevant to climate and show the consensus problem manifest.
Publications by this author
Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
Co-authors: Adam Frank and Evan Thompson | The MIT Press | March | 2024
It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future
HarperOne | August | 2023
Since Copernicus, humanity has increasingly seen itself as adrift, an insignificant speck within a large, cold universe. Brazilian physicist, astronomer, and winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize Marcelo Gleiser argues that it is because we have lost the spark of the Enlightenment that has guided human development over the past several centuries. While some scientific efforts have been made to overcome this increasingly bleak perspective-the ongoing search for life on other planets, the recent idea of the multiverse-they have not been enough to overcome the core problem: we've lost our moral mission and compassionate focus in our scientific endeavors.
Gleiser argues that we’re using the wrong paradigm to relate to the universe and our position in it. In this deeply researched and beautifully rendered book, he calls for us to embrace a new life-centric perspective, one which recognizes just how rare and precious life is and why it should be our mission to preserve and nurture it. The Dawn of a Mindful Universe addresses the current environmental and scientific impasses and how the scientific community can find solutions to them.
Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality, and the Human
Co-authors: David Chalmers, Antonio Damasio, Sean Carroll, B. Allan Wallace, Patricia Churchland, Jill Tarter, Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman | Columbia University Press | February | 2022
Does technology change who we are, and if so, in what ways? Can humanity transcend physical bodies and spaces? Will AI and genetic engineering help us reach new heights or will they unleash dystopias? How do we face mortality, our own and that of our warming planet? Questions like these—which are only growing more urgent—can be answered only by drawing on different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. They challenge us to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities and bring together perspectives that are too often kept apart.
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big questions: who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today.
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Interview | March | 2024
Marcelo Gleiser is the first Latin American to be awarded the Templeton Prize, known as the “Nobel Prize of spirituality,” in 2019. The physicist holds a postdoctoral degree from King’s College London, Fermilab in Chicago, and the University of California. He has published the bestsellers The Harmony of the World, The Dance of the Universe, and The End of the Earth and the Sky.
The panel of interviewers is formed by Denis R. Burgierman, editor-in-chief of Greg News; Giovana Girardi, head of socio-environmental coverage at Agência Pública; Marcelo Yamashita, professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Unesp and director of the Instituto Questão de Ciência; Ricardo Ogando, astrophysicist at the National Observatory; and Salvador Nogueira, science journalist and columnist for Folha de S.Paulo.
Feature | October | 2014
In The Island of Knowledge, Gleiser traces our search for answers to some of the most fundamental questions of existence and reaches a provocative conclusion: the main tool we use to find answers—science—is fundamentally limited. Yet recognizing science’s limits, Gleiser argues, is not a deterrent to progress or a surrendering to religion. Instead, it frees us to question the meaning and nature of the universe while affirming the central role of life and ourselves in it.
Feature | May | 2012
Dartmouth physicist-philosopher Marcelo Gleiser wonders if we can ever really know all there is to know. In this video, he probes the depths of the question.
