Here is a thoughtful
read for the weekend.
The Astrophysicist Who Loves the Things We
Cannot Know
A
conversation with “rational mystic,” physicist Marcelo Gleiser.
By Anne
Strainchamps
November 8,
2023
Marcelo
Gleiser thinks we have the story of the universe all wrong. And that it’s time
to restore Earth and humanity to the center of the cosmos. The Brazilian
physicist, astronomer, and winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize thinks modern
science has fallen prey to an increasingly bleak perspective—a view of Earth as
an insignificant speck alone in a cold, dark universe.
Gleiser, a
noted theoretical physicist who teaches at Dartmouth College, has published a
string of books on high energy physics, cosmology, and the origins of the
universe. In his latest, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s
Future, he writes that ever since Copernicus, “the more we learn about the
universe, the smaller and less important planet Earth seems.” It’s a toxic
narrative, he thinks, that set the stage for reckless use and abuse of the
planet’s resources. There aren’t that many writers who could make the story of
the Big Bang, expansion of the universe, and galaxy formation relevant to
fossil fuel consumption and the climate crisis. In Gleiser’s hands, the story
of the universe becomes a call to action.
In
a recent conversation, he seemed energized by the flood of new data raising
questions about the current model of the universe—and by the very real
possibility that humans will never truly understand the universe, a lesson he
felt personally after a devastating loss in childhood.
You have argued that findings from the James Webb telescope are calling the story
of our universe into question. What, specifically, makes you think cosmology
may be due for a conceptual revolution?
We
always thought stars were made when the universe was about 100 million years
old. So the usual narrative is that first you have a bunch of big, big stars.
They collect, they form black holes, they attract more stars, and then you have
galaxies. And this takes a while. The idea was that it would take about a
billion years for you to have big galaxies.
But
in comes the James Webb, and we find that, nope—there were huge galaxies right
around the same time that the first stars were being formed. So somehow we have
to find a way of increasing the speed at which galaxies form.
So we’re surrounded by mystery.
Absolutely.
I wrote a book called The Island of Knowledge a
few years ago, where I said that the island of knowledge is surrounded by the
ocean of the unknown. And as the island grows, so does its periphery, which is
the boundary between the known and the unknown. So the paradox of knowledge is
that the more you learn, the more you discover that you don’t know.
That sounds like a profoundly depressing realization for a
scientist.
If
you’re a card-carrying “reason will solve everything and science is truth,”
person, then maybe. But in my case, I think it’s inspiring because it means
there is no end to the quest; we humans will always have a limited grasp of
what reality is. And what could be more fascinating than being surrounded by
mystery?
If you’re someone who likes mystery. I think we humans tend to have
a contentious relationship with the unknown.
Yeah,
you know, in my other life, where I do all these extreme sports like endurance
running, we have this saying—“you have to get comfortable with being
uncomfortable.” I think that applies here too—you have to be comfortable with
the fact that we will never know everything, that there are questions that have
no answers, and that’s not a bad thing.
The
paradox of knowledge is that the more you learn, the more you discover that you
don’t know.
As a theoretical physicist, you’ve been working with big questions
and mysteries for most of your career, but what drew you in that direction to
begin with? I know your mother died when you were very young. Do you think that
helped shape you as someone who was drawn to those questions?
Yes,
absolutely, I have no doubt about that. I was 6 when my mother died, and it was
a time of darkness in my life. There was just this void, the emotional void of
not having a mom, you know? All your friends have moms, who come and pick them
up from school and hold their hands. My dad sometimes came by, but he was a
busy man. So what do you do with that kind of loss?
Did you have any kind of faith tradition to help explain it?
My
family is Jewish—and I had a pretty traditional Jewish education—with
traditions, but not so much belief in all of the details of the Old Testament.
But there’s an element of the supernatural in all the big monotheistic
religions, and I tried to connect with that. I was obsessed by supernatural
stories and supernatural beings. When I was about 11 years old, vampires in
particular were fascinating to me because they were both living and non-living,
they had a foot in the world of the dead and a foot in the world of the living.
So I said, “Hey, maybe if I became a vampire, I could go and connect with my
mom!”
And you were growing up in Rio de Janeiro, which must have been
filled with stories of the supernatural?
Oh,
big time. There were spirits everywhere, according to my nannies. My dad was
superstitious too. Every Monday was Souls’ Day, so people would go to the
crossroads and light up candles and leave offerings for the spirits. Yeah, in
Rio, you can’t avoid the other dimension.
Did you ever feel like you were able to be in touch with your
mother?
Many
times. In fact, if you had asked me when I was 9, I would have sworn that I
could see her sometimes hovering in the big, long corridor of my house. I was
desperate for that connection.
But
then I started to transition from that to nature and to being in the natural
world by myself. That’s when I began to fish. I was 12, and I would go all by
myself to Copacabana Beach and spend hours alone fishing. I mean, what kid does
that? I was surrounded by all these retired men, who were always like, “what is
this kid doing here?” And I was just there, hanging out, looking at the horizon
for 2 or 3 hours, you know, three or four times a week. For years, I did that.
It was really trying to connect with, I don’t know what, the vagueness of the
horizon? Because it is a weird place, the horizon, when you think about
it—where the earth and the heavens join. The line of connection between one
world—ours—and another world, which is up there.
I can see you feeling drawn to that—as though you yourself, in your
life, were hovering there, stuck on the horizon in a way, because your mother’s
death propelled you into this in-between place?
Exactly.
And then I discovered Einstein. And that changed everything because I realized
that some of these questions about space, about time, about duration, about the
origins of everything, were actually also scientific questions.
How do you go from being a boy who thinks maybe he could see his
mother’s ghost and who believes in spirits, to being a scientist working in the
materialist paradigm?
Well
you can see that I didn’t choose to work on superconductors or lasers or
bacteria! I chose to work on the nature of space and time and the Big Bang and
the origin of life. These are really boundary questions between scientific and
philosophical or religious thinking. So I think I found a way to be what you
could possibly call a rational mystic.
You
have to be comfortable with the fact that we will never know everything.
Did that ever create problems for you in the scientific community,
among other scientists?
No,
simply because I never told them. Like—and I’m not comparing myself to
Einstein—but I’m sure that Einstein also didn’t talk about his Spinoza notion
that God is everywhere.
That’s what he thought?
He
had a very wonderful—and I would say mystical—way of relating to this
intelligence that he found embedded in nature, which was some sort of divine
presence. He didn’t associate it with a Jewish God or anything like that, but
there was something and he thought that science was a portal to connecting with
this kind of intelligence.
That’s way more mystical than I thought Einstein was. I mean,
there’s his famous remark, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
Yeah,
but that was a joke. He had a much deeper connection, what I would call truly a
mystic connection to the natural world, and to this kind of hidden intelligence
in the depths of nature that we can never quite understand, but which is there.
He has this famous quote that I love, which is: “the most beautiful experience
we can have is the mysterious.” I mean, who would write that? Krishnamurti,
yes—but that was Einstein!
So we’re circling around the subject of storytelling. Lately you’ve
been saying that we need a new story of the universe, that ever since
Copernicus, science has been telling the story of cosmological history wrong.
That’s a pretty big rewrite.
I’m
saying we have to rethink the story of who we are and how we relate to the
planet. A little bit of deep time history here: Homo
sapiens have been here on this planet 300,000 years, more or less.
Of that time, about 95 percent, almost all of it, we were hunter gatherers
moving about the planet. And we had a completely different relationship to the
world than the agrarian civilizations did. For the hunter gatherers, the world
was sacred. They understood that there were powers in nature that were beyond
themselves, that they were not above nature.
But that was 10,000 years ago, so how do we know? Are you
extrapolating from what current Indigenous cultures and traditions have to say?
No,
we have anthropological evidence of how earlier hunter-gatherers congregated
and how and what they ate. It’s amazing that we can tell that story. And of
course, there is a dark side, and maybe overhunting was what caused the
extinction of the mastodon and other mammals. But yes, I think current
Indigenous cultures carry that tradition of coexisting with the natural world
and respecting the sacredness of a place. Agrarian societies ushered in a
complete phase transition: “look, we can actually control nature. We can tame
the plants and animals to serve our purposes, and we can be the masters of the
world.” No wonder the monotheistic religions say God created the world for
humans.
And suddenly we get stories of paradise. Gardens of Eden given to
us.
And
most importantly, look what happened to the gods. Once, they were part of the
trees, the rivers, the waterfalls, the winds, the volcanoes. Now, the gods are
way up there, far away from the world. The world is not divine anymore. It
becomes an object.
We
carry the whole history of the universe in ourselves.
And this is the precursor to the revolutionary moment when
Copernicus says Earth is also not the center of the universe?
Right.
And then when Copernicus says, “Look, the Earth is not even the center of
everything, the sun is,” then the Earth became not the center of creation, but
just another world. Which further disrupted the vertical hierarchy of us here
on Earth and the gods up in the skies. Now that Earth is revolving around the
sun, it becomes less important. And we become less important too, because
immediately after Copernicus, people started to speculate: “Wait a second. If
there are other worlds, why should life only be here?”
Really, right afterward?
Very,
very quickly. Copernicus published his book in 1543. In the 1580s, Giordano
Bruno was saying, look, the stars are just like the sun, so they should also
have planets moving around them, and those planets should have life, just like
here. In the early 1600s, Johannes Kepler, who came up with the mathematical
laws of planetary motion, wrote a fictional story about a trip to the moon.
So people were already beginning to think about escaping the Earth
and heading to other planets.
It
was all over the place. In 1686, one year before Newton published his famous
book that changed the world, a French philosopher, Bernard le Bovier de
Fontenelle, published a book called Conversations on the
Plurality of Worlds. And then as science advanced, we learned more
about stars and galaxies and the expansion of the universe. But within the
framework of the Copernican narrative, the more we learned about the universe,
the less important we and this planet became.
And today we talk about multiverses.
Yeah,
that’s the final insult, right? “Hey, there’s not just our universe, there are
countless universes! Ours is just one.”
There’s
this thing people talk about in astronomy, the principle of mediocrity—meaning
we are not important at all. I think this is just completely wrong. Because
there is a fundamental element missing in this whole story: We have no
clue what life is or how it emerged on this planet. I mean, we don’t even know how to define life very well. We have an
operational definition: a biochemical network system that is capable of
metabolism and of Darwinian evolution. But that’s what life does—it doesn’t tell me anything about what life is.
In the meantime, there’s a lot of money going into looking for
exoplanets that might support life. Elon Musk thinks we can terraform Mars.
There’s the whole narrative of “when we’ve wrecked this planet, we’ll head to
another.” You’re pushing back on all that?
Okay,
let’s qualify. Searching for other planets, and in particular searching for
biosignatures, meaning the signs of life, is essential research right now. I
work on this. But Elon Musk and terraforming Mars? That’s just silly stuff.
Our problem right now is the next few decades on this planet—not if, in 500
years, we’re going to have a colony on Mars. I mean, that’s useless.
Then why even bother looking for exoplanets? Why not focus our
attention on this one?
Because
that’s how we advance knowledge, by asking profound questions about the
universe and matter. Looking for life on other planets is essential because for
now, as far as we know, Earth is the only planet that has life. The
post-Copernican narrative decreased the value of our world, and we constructed
a whole civilization based on the idea that we can use and abuse it. We built
giant cities and industries by essentially consuming the entrails of our
planet. Oil, gas, and coal—the insides of the planet—fed our technologies, and
it all worked until it didn’t.
Without
our voice, the universe itself would have no memory.
At this point, it almost seems like the problems are too big to do
anything about.
So
what can we do? Well, we can tell a different story. First of all, when you look at the
evolution of life, you realize that it’s completely dependent on the history of
the planet. If you change or tweak something that happened here on our planet a
long time ago, life would be different, which means we wouldn’t be here.
The
most famous example is 66 million years ago, the big asteroid hits the Yucatan
Peninsula. It wipes out the dinosaurs and a bunch of other creatures, with the
exception, maybe, of the birds and some little mammals. It completely changed
the evolution of life on the planet. And it was a cosmic accident.
So your point is, it’s not about counting up the number of planets
that could possibly support life because they’ve got the right chemistry and
the right mass. It’s that there were so many little contingencies without which
you could never get this form of life again. Although, you might get a better
one.
What
I’m trying to say is that instead of thinking of the Earth as just another
planet and life as ubiquitous in the universe, the truth is that Earth is not
just another planet. The Earth is a very rare oasis that has supported life for
at least three and a half billion years, which allowed for life to change and
adapt to different environments that coincidentally and completely randomly
evolved to generate a species that is able to reconstruct this entire story and
to tell it. And without our voice, the universe itself would have no story,
would have no memory. It would be a dead universe. So it’s not just that we are
we are stardust, as Carl Sagan used to say—we are how the universe is telling
its own story.
I
think this is only possible because of this incredibly spectacular and rare
planet that we live on. Look at Mars, a horrible frozen desert. Look at Venus,
a boiling soup of sulfuric acid. Other planets, you can’t even stand on them
because they’re gas giants. So this is not just another world; it’s a rare
gem in the universe. And yes, there could be other planets with life on them,
maybe. But probably very simple life—single celled organisms. Never or very
rarely complex organisms.
More here:
https://nautil.us/the-astrophysicist-who-loves-the-things-we-cannot-know-436828/
I reckon
there is a good deal of “food for thought” here!
I hope you
read and ehjoy.
David.
