Physics, Art, and other ways of looking:

An Interview with Dr. Marcelo Gleiser

What lines can be drawn between literature and physics? How can we sync these fields to find new ways of exploring our minds and our humanity? Dr. Marcelo Gleiser, renowned theoretical physicist, professor, and winner of the Templeton Prize—an award for individuals who explore the deepest spiritual questions of our universe also granted to the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa—speaks with the Napkin about imagined universes, doubt, and the intellectual history of the cosmos. In his work and university courses such as “Physics for Poets”, he asks, “How do science and religion converse with one another, or do they, and why should they do so? How does your personal history fit into this big conversation and how do you see you as a human being contributing to humanity in the decades to come?” Through Dr. Gleiser’s interdisciplinary research and outreach, we can learn more about approaching post-enlightenment realities as well as how to live our “fox” lives.

 As a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and advocate for the interdisciplinary connections between science and the humanities, you have been inspiring to our own mission to bridge gaps between arts and sciences through poetry. "Science offers one way of looking into the world, especially when it's complemented by other ways of looking, like poetry, music, philosophy, religion," you’ve said in a previous interview with Seven Days. Could you tell us more about how you became interested in other ways of “looking”?

My interests have a lot to do with my personal history. I was lucky to grow up in a family that cultivated culture and looked at not just the facts of life and being a professional in a specific job, but also at art, music, and literature. That upbringing helped me open my mind from a very early age to the fact that there are very different ways of knowing—there are very different ways of looking at the same question. I think this is crux of whatever you're interested in: how do you look at the world these days from a one-dimensional lens when you could gain more by looking at reality from a multi-dimensional lens? This theme has guided the history of my professional life.

When you're becoming a professional scientist, you have to abandon those projects and focus completely on getting a PhD and writing papers and getting postdocs and becoming a faculty member. But I always knew that the science questions that I was interested were not the very pragmatic questions—I was never that kid that fixed broken radios or TVs. Instead, I was fascinated by the more fundamental existential questions about who we are and where do we come from and why are we here. As a teenager, I realized that a lot of these questions have been more the province of religion, philosophy, and the arts. Seeing science begin to become another leg on this conversation motivated me to expand the reach of science towards all these other ways of thinking about the world.

One of your courses has been titled “Physics for Poets—a title we think is wonderful. Can you tell us more about what this course was about?

“Physics for poets” is a title for physics courses designed for non-science majors. Though they tend to minimize the mathematics required ,they are true physics courses that just don’t empty away the humanistic side of science. Oftentimes, other physics courses don’t talk about the cultural context in which this science emerged—they don’t talk about the people. Who was Marie Curie and Einstein and Newton and Kepler and why were they thinking the way they were thinking? I grew very dissatisfied with these technical courses and said, this is not the kind of course that I think a true liberal arts education should be offering students.

So I invented a new course which initially was taught with a colleague from history named Richard Kremer. We spoke about the Copernican era: how did Copernicus come to be? Where did this guy come from in the 16th century? But it turns out there’s a much more extensive history behind him that extends back to the Islamic Empire in the Middle Ages, a culture that rescued a lot of forgotten knowledge from the Greeks.

In this vein, I devised a syllabus for the course that begins before science and even philosophy existed, that really starts with the creation myths of many different cultures. I then realized that there has never been a book for that, so I wrote a book called The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang which it still used as the dorsal spine of the course. It’s a book about the intellectual history of the cosmos and how humans came to figure out across time what are universes and where do we fit into them. Though it speaks about the creation myths from all over the world, it tends to be more Western-centric because science as we know it is very Western-centric.

I tell my students that this science course is like none other they have done before because of the way we're going to ask questions. Yes, you're going to learn about the laws of motion, you're going to learn about gravity and relativity and quantum physics and black holes, but you're also going to learn about the ethical or moral implications of science in modern society. How do science and religion converse with one another, or do they, and why should they do so? How does your personal history fit into this big conversation and how do you see you as a human being contributing to humanity in the decades to come?

I'm not just here to tell you that, yes, light is the maximum speed of stuff in nature, but also how these understandings imply that our knowledge is limited. If our knowledge is limited, that means we have to embrace the unknown. We have to embrace not knowing as part of being human. In this way, the course has all sorts of philosophical and emotional, existential, repercussions that I love. From teaching this over the years, I can see the students also love it so it's been a great pleasure to teach this.

In a conversation with novelist Marilynne Robinson for the podcast On Being, you talk about how the mind of a novelist is a “multiverse,” creating models for the world in a way akin to physics. How do you understand the overlaps between scientific and humanistic approaches to our world?

To look at the overlap between the sciences and the humanities is a very broad question, but if we stick with the novelist for now, we have both people imagining possible universes to learn about who we are. So, in science, you have to do a test to determine if an idea makes sense, if it’s really how the world works or not. But in a sense, that is what the novelist is trying to do too. As many novelists say, we tell lies so we can tell the truth. This means that we invent a story that might not be real, but the goal of that story is to reach our humanity at many different levels and by doing so, we are growing as individuals and we're growing as a society by creating culture. Even though scientists are not imagining universes with the freedom that a novelist has, we are also fulfilling part of our quest for knowing who we are.

There's this beautiful quote by Einstein about how the most profound experience we can feel is the mysterious with a capital M because it is the mysterious which is the cradle of all arts and sciences. If you do not feel this attraction to the mysterious, you are as dead as a snuffed-out candle. I love that quote because it puts the arts and the sciences as complementary pathways to our quest to understand who we are. So in the podcast conversation, Marilyn and I talked extensively about this. When I got the Templeton prize in 2019, I invited her to be the outside speaker for that event and she gave a very nice address, sort of like a continuation of our conversation with Krista Tippett.

We cannot look at the world from a one-dimensional perspective, you know, and unfortunately, that is what education tends to do. You look at our university and it is broken down into departments with very high walls between them; people don't talk to one another. Often, if they do try to talk to one another, they don't understand one another. This is a problem known as the two cultures problem, the two cultures here being the sciences and humanities. There’s a beautiful essay from 1959 by a physicist and novelist about this notion that we tell stories to make sense of who we are—that's a need that we have. I think all novelists know this while not many scientists know this because our training is very one-dimensional—we are trained to be technicians. In another famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” by one of my intellectual heroes, Isaiah Berlin, he says that there are two different kinds of thinkers. The hedgehogs go very deep into specific topic whereas the fox knows many ways of getting things right. Even though I'm a scientist, I consider myself much more of a fox. But the majority of scientists tend to be trained as hedgehogs because it's a very specialized practice. What I tried to do with my work is to live my fox life, to be a little all over the place.

We’ve spoken with several individuals who are involved in arts-based research, a form of qualitative research that uses art as secondary data, and we’re curious what your thoughts are on science’s capacity to understand quantitatively how the mind creates art.

I think it's a very long shot. I think that, yes, there are of course scientific insights. For example, you can program computers to write stories and compose music in the mode of Mozart or Bach, but I don't think that illuminates at all how the human mind creates. I don't think you can think of creation just in terms of the human mind either. We are very embodied presences in the world, and the way we look at reality is not just through our brains but through our whole beings and experiences. Everything that we do, including all of our creative processes, start with our experiences of being in the world.

I don't know how you can make a machine understand: they can only mimic stuff that we have done. So I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to whether we are going to understand everything there is to be understood about the brain. Maybe a lot of this is just wishful thinking that we are not a computer algorithm at all. But when you put an fMRI on someone's head while that person is composing music or painting or writing poetry, some of the neurons are going to light up. You're going to say, oh look at that, when somebody is writing something sad, this part lights up. Or, that different part of the brain lights up when somebody is writing something happy. You can map these associations beautifully but that is going to tell you nothing about what it is for that person to create something happy or something sad.

You founded the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth College, whose mission “is dedicated to transforming the dialogue between the sciences and the humanities in academia and in the public sphere in order to explore fundamental questions where a cross-disciplinary exchange is essential.” Can you describe your experience heading this Institute?

The Institute is the ultimate expression of the way I think about the world. It wasn't an easy thing to do because to be frank, Dartmouth wasn't very supportive of it at first. When I got the grant from the Templeton Foundation, bringing $4 million to the university, everybody got excited to a certain extent and finally the Institute became a reality.

My goal was always to make this into a permanent institute the Dartmouth since it would be such a beautiful expression of the liberal arts education. We’re bringing scientists from the natural and social sciences as well as people in the humanities to talk about the big questions of our time. Unfortunately, this will be the Institute’s last year and I’m going to have one final conference in June about the future of humanity from scientific and humanistic perspectives. Then, I plan to apply for another grant in the hopes to continue the Institute, if in a very different way.

The beautiful thing is that we are publishing a book based on all these conversations with Columbia University Press, so the Institute will have a legacy.

What do you think about the disconnect between the messiness—imperfections and inconsistencies—that is often dissuaded from scientific models but celebrated in the arts? How do you understand the horizon for cross-disciplinary work in the future?

I think that this is a time of awakening. The compartmentalization of universities is a very enlightenment-based inheritance, implying that there's only one answer to every question that then has to come from reasons following scientific methodology. Now, we’re beginning to understand that we need to overcome the lessons from the Enlightenment: it's time for a post-enlightenment way of thinking about the world, about society, about reality. The only way to do that is to integrate a constructive engagement to explore different ways of knowing.

People really are beginning to wake up to that idea. For example, I started the Institute here in 2016 and in those intervening five years, Columbia University has started something very similar called the Center for Ideas and imagination. Yale has a center which is almost identical to what we have right now, and Harvard also created one that highlights both arts and sciences as a formative social force. But they all revolve around the same sentiment: that we need to talk one to one another between disciplines more than we talk to colleagues from our own disciplines because the world-wide questions that we have to face now are multi-dimensional questions.

You cannot talk about climate change, for example, just from a scientific perspective or just from a political perspective or just from an economic perspective. The same applies to AI and automation. These are not Sci-fi scenarios anymore, these are real questions that are part of us. The cell phone has become an extension of ourselves, so in that sense we are already becoming cyborgs.

There are all sorts of awesome and perhaps scary consequences of all this, but for the future of humanity these questions need a cross-disciplinary engagement. I am continuing my own role in this work by starting a podcast with a colleague here in the United States which is going to be called the Critical Point. It's about transformation at the individual and social levels, and it will be a manifesto for post-enlightenment ways of thinking about reality. I also have podcasts and a YouTube channel in Portuguese; since I grew up in Brazil, I feel like I owe a lot to the country. I'm so happy that I can see people beginning to pay attention to all these questions––even really powerful groups of thinkers that I didn't know were listening, but they are. Now, we see these cross-disciplinary works flourishing.