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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The Earth has existed for nearly 5 billion years and, to this point, no other forms of life have been identified in the seemingly boundless expanse of outer space. Commentator Marcelo Gleiser says this simple fact has deep implications for who we are and how we should treat life here on our home world. -
The diversity of life on Earth, and its ever-growing complexity, leads many people to think that there must be a purpose to its existence. Commentator Marcelo Gleiser argues that, quite the contrary, the only purpose of life is to preserve itself. There is no hidden hand behind it all. -
Confronted with the amazing advances made by science, why do so many still cling to God as a creator? Could the answer be that we need to be created in order to be special? Or are we afraid of our own unique place in the Universe? Marcelo Gleiser knows what he thinks. -
As scientists advance their understanding of how the Earth has changed through billions of years, it becomes increasingly clear that the Earth and the life on it are entwined in unique ways. Commentator Marcelo Gleiser goes in search of the origins of life in a meeting of the minds at CERN. -
Dark matter, which surrounds most galaxies, plays a key role in the structure of the cosmos. But we can't see it. Or can we? Recently, astronomers used a remarkable effect predicted by Einstein to spot a very tenuous bridge of dark matter linking two galaxy clusters.
