Marcelo Gleiser

The other day, I was giving a public lecture when someone asked me a question that I wish people would ask me more often: "Professor: Why are you a scientist?"

I answered that I couldn't do anything else, that I considered it a privilege to dedicate my life to teaching ...

I recently started reading Superintelligence, a new book by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, who is also director of the Future of Humanity Institute. (Now, that's a really cool job title.)

Bostrom is well-known for his famous argument that there is a real chance that we live in ...

A recent article in The New York Times explores the explosive wave of smartphone recordings of events, from the most meaningful to the most trivial.

Everyone is, or wants to be, the star of their own life, and the rage is on to capture every moment deemed meaningful. YouTube ...

Some of you may have seen "Our Story in 2 Minutes," a 2012 video edited by Joe Bush and with music from Zack Hemsey. As of this writing, it had more than 17.2 million views on YouTube from people all over the world. If you haven't seen it, here is ...

Perhaps I shouldn't have used a conditional on the title. After all, we are already creating life.

Recently, Craig Venter, from the J. Craig Venter Institute, announced the creation of a living, self-reproducing bacterial cell with a DNA sequence produced in the laboratory. According to Laurie Garrett's article in ...

It was the Roman poet Lucretius, writing around 50 B.C., who famously proclaimed reason as a tool to achieve individual freedom, as a means of breaking free from superstitions that enslave the human mind:

"This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining ...

Given that science is believed to be about certainty, betting on a scientific idea sounds like an oxymoron.

Yet scientists bet on ideas all the time, even if mostly for jest. Of course, this only makes sense before we have any data pointing toward the correctness of the disputed hypothesis.

Well into the 21st century, it is indisputable that we know more about the universe than ever before.

So that we don't get lulled into a false sense of confidence, today I provide a short list of open questions about the cosmos, focusing only on its composition. These are some ...

Mortality is humanity's blessing and its curse.

Because we are aware of the passage of time, because we know that one day we won't be here — and neither will everyone we love (and everybody else) — we have always searched for an answer to this most painful of mysteries: ...

The origin of life remains one of the most challenging open questions in science.

We don't know (yet) how lifeless molecules self-organized to become a living entity. We do know it happened at least here on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago, possibly earlier. Perhaps "self-organized" is the wrong word, ...

Last week, I came across George Johnson's piece for The New York Times, "Beyond Energy, Matter, Time and Space," where he writes, in his usually engaging style, about two recent books with opposite viewpoints concerning what we can and cannot know of the world.

On the one hand, we ...

Where do values come from? Culture? Life experience? Family traditions? Upbringing? Religion? How do we decide what is right and what is wrong, given that, in most situations, there are arguments for and against opposing viewpoints? Often, what is right for one person is wrong for another, and from these ...

Something quite extraordinary happened in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries: the diversified intellectual explosion called the Enlightenment. Philosophers, natural scientists (the divide between the two wasn't that wide then), artists and political scientists created a revolution in thought based on equal rights for men the freedom to ...

It's common to hear that physics is in crisis; usually when some new mystery pops up or an unexpected event defies current theories. Without judging, I present a very incomplete list of a few of the challenges facing fundamental physics. Are they symptoms that we are going down the wrong ...

The famous American physicist Richard Feynman once made an interesting comparison between games and the laws of nature (here adapted to soccer to keep up with the spirit of the Word Cup):

"We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes 'the world' is ...

The reader may remember the news from around mid-March: a dramatic discovery made by scientists from the BICEP2 experiment, measuring what could be a signal from the very earliest times after the Big Bang, the closest we could hope to get to "creation" itself. It made the front page ...

Now that the World Cup has started, it's hard, at least for this Brazilian-born scientist, not to think about soccer. But since this is 13.7, let's consider the prospect of soccer on the galactic level by asking: Do ETs play ball?

Let's suppose that there is life elsewhere and that, ...

How is it that we define a human? Is it our body? Our genome? Our behaviors? Our self-awareness? Our compassion? Our minds? All of these and then something more? What now may be obvious to most people about being human will become less so as we become progressively more integrated ...

We are surrounded by mystery. This may sound like an anti-science statement but, actually, it's precisely the opposite. We just need to be careful about how we define mystery or the mysterious. Take Albert Einstein, for example:

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the ...

The "here and now." We say these words with perfect calm and composure, as if they mean something. We think we know what they mean. They serve an obvious purpose in our lives. But come to think of it, even if we have more freedom with the "here" — as ...