Tonights speaker. Marcelo gleiser is a theoretical physicist and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at dartmouth college. His work ranges from cosmology and applications of information theory to complex phenomena to history and philosophy of science, how science and culture interact. He is a fellow of the american physical society, a recipient of the president ial faculty award from the white house and National Science foundation and, was awarded the 2019 templeton prize and has authored five books and is the cofounder of 13. 8, where he writes about science and culture with physicist adam frank. He is devoted to the understanding of science and his books have been published in 15 languages. A native of riyadh, janeiro, brazil, he lives in hanover, hampshire. Marcelo gleiser is presenting his new book, the dawn of a mindful universe, a manifesto for future since copernicus yes, humanity has increasingly seen itself as adrift in insignificant speck within a large cold universe. In donovan mindful universe, Marcelo Gleiser argues that it is we have lost the spark of the enlightenment, has guided humanity that has guided him in development over the past several centuries. While some scientific efforts have been over the past. Excuse me, while some scientific efforts have been made to overcome this increasingly bleak perspective, the ongoing search for life on other planets, the recent idea of the multiverse, they have not been enough. Overcome the core problem. Weve lost our moral mission and compassion and focus in scientific endeavors. In the words of marc oconnell, quote, Marcelo Gleiser is precise. The kind of public, intellectual or intellectual will our culture urgently needs a skilled communicator of complex ideas whose work is animated by a humane and humanistic sensibility. The dawn of a mindful universe guided by a profound sense of civilization, no urgency as it charts a path toward re enchantment. We are so to host this event here at Harvard Bookstore tonight. Please join me in welcoming Marcelo GleiserMarcelo Gleiser here. Okay. There are three microphones, so im a little overwhelmed by sound here. Well, first of all, thank you all for coming. I know its hard these days to compete for attention. You know, there are so many things going on, including a beautiful afternoon in blue skies. So i really appreciate that you the time to come and hear what i have to say and. Hopefully have a conversation. I notice that the next two events have conversations between two people and hopefully this be a conversation between all of us. But before we go there, i will tell you a little bit what this book is trying to say. And im not sure if i i think i should stand here. Look, this way is okay. Awesome. Much better for me. Okay, so you know, ive written other books where, where i talked about basically what is general activity, what quantum mechanics, the origin, life in the universe and things related to the science narrative that we have constructed over the last 500 years or so. To make sense who we are in the universe. Right. And this book in a sense continues that trend, but with a completely different and the spin is that, i dont know about you. Im profoundly worried about future of our project of civilization and i think that the way we are dealing with the planet with its resources and with the other with which we are sharing space is not sustainable so this book will talk about science, but well talk about science in a way supporting a different kind of worldview of what it means to be human in this planet, in this universe right. So i will read some parts of it in a second, but i just to give you the general sort of idea idea, think about our species for a while right sapiens. So weve been around for about 300,000 years or so and. Of these 300,000 years, about 95 of that time, up to ten, 15,000 years ago, we were organized in bands of hunter gatherers, you know, nomadic tribes that would just go around and look for food, hunt for food, have small organizational hierarchies to keep the group together right. And that has the way has been the way in which we of for most the vast majority of our history as a species existed in this planet. And for most of those people, and including pretty much the vast majority of indigenous cultures, there are still with us today. The relationship with the planet sacred. There was, a fundamental relationship between being human and being a world surrounded by animated spirits. Now, what were those spirits . Everything. So the rivers. The mountains and the storms the volcanoes that was relationship between our urge to try to understand things that were beyond our power to understand and establish a kind of connection, a kind of conversation between this remarkable power of nature and the fragility that these people certainly felt because it so hard to survive and what happened in after these 95 of our hour, of our collective history is that we started to get together into agrarian societies starting in the middle east. Right. And those societies were extremely successful in producing more food in an easier which allowed people to into bigger and cities. Right. And as that happened the more and more people you had. Right, the more and more of an urge and a need for discipline and for hierarchy and power was also needed. So you had leaders that were supported by some sort of soldiers or police, etc. To keep everybody in check. Right. And as that happens, Something Else happened was the notion that we were beginning to become so powerful with the fire fire, with the will, with other tools that we developed that we started to feel that we were above nature, that we were not part of this collective. But we sort of grew this thing, which was really above Everything Else that we could control the Natural World, that we could the animals that we could not be affected by, all these natural things that going on all the time. So stronger the cities and the walls, the city, the less nature part of peoples lives. Right. And this trend kind of continued for a long time. And technology to become even more powerful with perhaps a little break in the in the early middle ages. But later this emergence of this idea that we are beyond the Natural World was actually supported by a different kind of revolution which the gastronomical the scientific revolution of the and 17th centuries where what happened well and im going here over thousands of years of history intense 1010 minutes. What happened was essentially that up to copernicus earth was the center of everything. Everything revolved around us. And if you are from the christian persuasion, which in europe was the vast majority, you believed that you were created by god in his image, enhanced really kind of the top. The top in a sense. We are the center. The whole universe is revolving around our planet. And and what happened then is that copernicus said, you know, there is a way of looking at this and. In the beginning of the book, i actually the only part which i fictionalize is the whole history of copernicus and and his death and, his book. So copernicus wrote one book in his life, what i call all the revolutions of the heavenly spheres and im going to tell you the story because its kind of important and he didnt really want to write this book and he had one friend and one student in all his life. He was sort of a recluse to live on top of a tower in poland who looked at the universe. Reticence sighs, believing that there some new order that was possible, the planets. And he said, you know thats reorganize everything and think the solar system with the sun in the center and the earth as just a planet going around it. He didnt really have the physics back that up, but he had this that intuition and data that was very indeed. You know, he was not a very good astronomer. He was using data that was from the that was almost a thousand years before him, which was ptolemy right in alexandria, mostly anyway. So he created this vision. He wrote this book and he gave the book to his student to be published because, you know, in those days, publishing books was a very complicated thing to do. You had to work with publisher to make sure everything was okay. So he gave it to his students, which was it was called radicals. And he went to nuremberg to publish the book as this was going on. It was a work of many months. Radicals is accused of homosexuality, has to run away from nuremberg, gives the book to the only other person nuremberg, that he believed was capable of. You know, having this work completed properly who was a lutheran theologian called andreas osi. And there who hated the ideas copernicus had. And they had to exchange all these letters in which the other said, you know, is a crazy, crazy notion that the earth is just moving around. You know, how can you prove that . And luther actually back that up. He was so the Catholic Church was not a critique of copernicus until six years after his death. You know, so the criticism first came from the lutheran church, especially from luther. And so zander accepts the job and does very perverse he writes an anonymous preface to the book so he does not sign it where he says something like, you know, this book has some very interesting ideas and it should be as a guide to kind, like, navigate and to think about calendars, etc. But for a second think that this idea that the sun is the center of everything has anything to do with reality. This is just a model, and if you believe otherwise, youre going leave the reading of this book more of a fool than you did when you started. So story is that copernicus had a stroke before and received this book on his bed. He read that book. He read the preface and he died that same day. Died of disgust because the whole the work of a whole lifetime is being contradicted and he didnt even know who did it right. And for about 50 years nobody knew who did. So nobody or almost no one took copernicus seriously. And it was kepler like in the early 1600s that actually figured out what was going on. And and this historian of science is a professor at harvard, actually on gingerich, who passed away, i think, last year, a wonderful man. He wrote a book called the book. Nobody read what book was that was copernicuss book. So he went around europe. He found all these excellent copies, tried to figure out who read the book and that very few people importance had read that book. And one of them being giordano, who in 1580 start was, i think, the first kind of like open copernican and he got into tremendous trouble with the inquisition because. Not only he said that, a, the is just a planet, but all stars have planets moving around them and theyll be people in those planets and they are people, theyll be sinners in. The plan because you know, we cant separate people from sin. And so the question is who, is the jesus that saves them is that many . Is this the same . Whats doing with these other people . So he said that he also said that mary was a virgin, that there was no eternal damnation and that there was no holy trinity. So he got into big trouble with the inquisition, did not repent, had eight years to change his mind. He didnt change his mind. And in 1600 he was burned at. The stake at this square in rome called company fury and is a big statue of Giordano Bruno. So things were ideas very dangerous at the time anyways. And in that frame of mind, what copernicus did was course vindicated later. Kepler, galileo, newton etc. Obviously the earth is a planet around the sun, but then copernican is then became something more. Something more. And to me more disturbing, which is that if you ask about the narrative, right, we humans are storytellers, right . And we tell stories about everything. We tell stories about my Favorite Football Team or my my family, my childhood, what i believe in, where i went to school. We tell about who we are, where we came from, about the history of the universe which is perhaps the grandest of all the stories because it embraces all the stories. Everything fits into this and the story that came from copernican is is that the end. The advances of science that followed since the 17th and 18th century is that the more understand the universe, the less important we become. Its been a sequence of undignified discoveries, right . So first of all, the earth was the center became just a planet. But then the sun was the center. But not really, because its just a star. There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the milky way alone. And then of course, in the early 1920 years it was discovered that even the milky way, which people thought the only galaxy in the universe is not, there are hundreds of, billions of all the galaxies out there. They all planets, they all have these planets, moons. And for these galaxies are moving away from one another. The universe is expanding and a few decades things got even more complicated. Even the math that we are made of, you know, the atoms, the stuff were made, theyre just about 4 of whats really out there in the universe. The rest is these things we it dark matter and dark energy, which remain a tremendous mystery right of what they are. So we are really not that important in this cosmic insignificance thats the thats the story that weve been telling the world not important. And there is even a principle came out of the copernican which of course the principle of mediocrity which makes me want to cry, which the idea being that our world is mediocre because there are so many like ours. Im going to destroy that in a second, but hold the thought there is many earths there and because of that we life, therell be abundant life, the universe, and because of that we are not important. We are just mediocre observers. Theyll be others like us or similar to us, spread across the universe right. And, and then of course, to get things even more dramatic, the press, if i say even our universe, supposedly the thing that is everything is just one amongst this multitude of universes called the multiverse. So then you so every the more we we discover, the less important we become. And that is a story to tell because its a story that decreases the value we attach to who we are decreases the value we attach life decreases the value attach to the planet and to how we relate to it because has happened along way in which this vision of, the universe has developed is that industrialization had happened and the object objectification of nature happened and what was once sacred to our ancestors for a very part of our existence. And so for many indigenous cultures around the world became just something you could control, dominate, dispose of, used as wanted, right . And that world view is whats leading us to this impasse that we have right now, which is what we going to do in the next few decades, how are we going to reorient our stories so that we can actually sustain, gain some level of without self cannibalizing . Thats the point right. And then you go and i met behind me and around this bookstore, there will be a ton of books which tell us about dystopian future that we are doomed humanity finished. There is nothing we can do about, you know, because of greed, because humans bad. Theres one book by bregman, who is a dutch journalist, called me humankind, which is i think everybody should read this book because he tries to dismantle this that we are evil and construct out another narrative say actually we are not he on talking about i shouldnt talk about his book or talk about but anyways he goes on to talk about he should how many these social psychology experiments that we have been told like the Stanford Prison Experiment they are all frauds and its a real powerful thing anyways so assuming we actually not that bad that were actually good, can we rethink the story of who we are and how do we do that . So im to pause for a second and read a little bit the book so that we can see how i tried to this argument through words that written as opposed to spoken and. Then ill continue so here he goes. The universe has a history only because we are here to tell it through our diligence ingenuity we have pieced together the main chapters of the long saga that began with the big bang. 13. 8 billion years ago. This story unfolds in the vastness of space narrating the drama of matter, dancing to the tune of attract attractive and repulsive forces shaping into ever more complex structures that became stars, galaxies planets, life, us the way we tell a story makes a difference and its time to retell story of who we are under a new mindset. This book is about life on earth. Its cosmic relevance about humanity is moral mandate to rise above past, to reshape our collective future. I write it with a sense of urgency and hope, and the main argument of this book is what i call biased centrism. It has nothing to do with human exceptionalism. Its about any world that hosts life is a sacred world and needs to be respected and protected at all costs. And because we added species as far as we know that knows this, it is on us to do this. Okay. And im going to elaborate this argument as we go. The advent of life changed, everything, life mattered with purpose, with an urge to exist. Right . Compare an amoeba in a rock, right . An amoeba will sense a sugar gradient in a solution is going to move towards that somehow a rock just stays there. There is something about life that is just different. And we no idea what it is. All right. So one of the biggest mysteries of science right now is how the heck. Three and a half billion years ago, a bunch of molecules got together and and became what we call a selfsustaining molecular machine, capable of metabolism eating and reproduction, life metabolism and reproduce ocean life. But this is all coming from stuff that was not alive. So this transition from to living is trivial at all. So the mistake, the principle of mediocrity, people that use sort of the big number is, hey, you know what, the universe huge. There are trillions of planets out. They are just in our galaxy is true now we know which is awesome. You know that of course therell be another earth kind of just like and that is just not true for several reasons. Okay. The first reason is that if you pause and look at all the worlds of our solar system, you know, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, theyre all spectacular remarkable. They are all. Different from one another. They all had a completely different story starting four and a half billion years ago. They all came from the same initial nebula, but they all developed in different ways and. This is going to be true of every single planet and moon that exists in the whole universe. There will be no two planets or moons. Theyre exactly alike. So this thing of earth 2. 0, which is actually the of a chinese nation that is going to be launched in a few years, is looking for earth 2. 0. Ill explain that means in a second youre just not going to happen. What we do when people say like in astrobiology which is the stu