Marcelo Gleiser

Given the time of the year, it's hard not to go back to some of our perennial questions about beginnings; in our case here at 13.7, I'm talking about the beginning of nothing less than everything, the origin of the universe.

Here is one place where the boundaries between scientific ...

I write to you from Agra, India, where I've spent a week in a conference on the possible relationship between the foundations of quantum physics and the workings of the mind. The main focus of the conference was this: does quantum physics play a role in how the brain ...

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," said the Fox to the Little Prince. And although in Saint-Exupéry's fable the "invisible" referred to love, the Fox was also right on when it comes to about 95 percent of the universe.

The stuff we can't see controls the destiny of ...

This morning I had to turn the radio off. It was all about death: suicide bombers in Iraq killed 75 people; a bus exploded in India, killing 72. My 7-year-old son, sitting in the back, was horrified.

"Geez dad, and you think video games are violent?"

It occurred to me ...

I noticed in The Guardian that there's a book coming out this week listing the 20 biggest challenges for modern science. I'd like to go over 10 of them today, perhaps coming back to the other 10 next week.

*Every list of "most important questions" comes freighted with a ...

Would you like to see yourself in the future? If you found a magic mirror capable of showing your image one, two or three decades away, would you look? I imagine opinions would be split on the wisdom of gazing into this special reflector.

Seeing the future raises all sorts ...

Last week I wrote about some of the themes from my book A Tear at the Edge of Creation. Today, I want to briefly state the reasons why a so-called "Theory Of Everything" (TOE) is an impossibility. We have to do away with this idea for once ...

To celebrate the publication of the paperback edition of my book A Tear at the Edge of Creation, I want to go back to some of its themes, given that it's been three years and a lot has happened since then. From the discovery of the Higgs boson to ...

One hundred years ago Niels Bohr introduced the idea of quantum jumps with his model of the atom. Since then, and in unexpected ways, quantum physics has taken over the world.

Seeing the world through a quantum lens brought us some of the most transformative technological innovations ...

Today I'd like to go back to a topic that leaves most people perplexed, me included: the nature of consciousness and how it "emerges" in our brains. I wrote about this a few months ago, promising to get back to it. At this point, no scientist or philosopher in ...

Rarely is the relationship between science and everyone so direct as it is in the case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in particular foods. It is one thing to turn on your plasma TV or talk on your iPhone; it is an entirely different proposition to knowingly ingest something that ...

In general terms, there are two eras that characterize the 200,000 years or so of human presence on Earth: first, and for most of this time, the hunter-gatherers, nomadic groups that roamed the land in search of food and shelter. Then came what we call "civilization," product of the fixation ...

According to reductionism, every system, no matter how complex, can be understood in terms of the behavior of its basic constituents. The focus is on the bottom layer of the material chain: matter is made of molecules; molecules of atoms; atoms of electrons, protons, and neutrons; protons and neutrons of ...

We humans are an unruly bunch. So much so that we need laws to keep order, to make sure we stay on track. Without our laws, society would quickly descend into chaos. The laws of man are guarantors of order, a necessary control against the inherent greediness of our species.

I don't mean our private lives, our personal choices and hopes, the plans we make along the years. I imagine that each and every one of us believes our lives do have a purpose, or many. What I mean is life as a natural phenomenon, this strange assembly of matter ...

We think we know the real world; it's the one we perceive around us. All we have to do is open our eyes, sharpen our ears and we have a portrait of reality based on our senses. Most of us are perfectly happy with this construction, not knowing or caring ...

Last week NASA scientists put the space telescope Kepler in a kind of technological coma. The craft, designed to search for Earth-like planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighborhood (within a few thousand light-years, that is), failed and seems to be unfixable. (Hope remains, though.)

Launched in 2009, ...

Of the many mysteries of modern physics, few compare to "nonlocality" in quantum physics. Nonlocality means that far away objects can influence one another instantaneously (or, at least, much faster than the speed of light). It is as if space and time didn't exist!

"Influence" may not be the right ...

Last week I gave a lecture at a corporative event for some 200 executives in the insurance business. Although this happened abroad, my experience is that things would not have been very different here. My mission was to jump-start some macro-level reflection, gently pushing people out of their comfort zone, ...

People often ask me how I got interested in science. I wish I could answer that I had a mentor when I was a child, that a biologist or a physicist visited my school when I was in third grade and transformed my life. But that's not what happened to ...