An award-winning astronomer and physicist's spellbinding and urgent call for a new Enlightenment and the recognition of the preciousness of life using reason and curiosity--the foundations of science--to study, nurture, and ultimately preserve humanity as we face the existential crisis of climate change. Since Copernicus, humanity has increasingly seen itself as adrift, an insignificant speck within a large, cold universe. Brazilian physicist, astronomer, and winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize Marcelo Gleiser argues that it is because we have lost the spark of the Enlightenment that has guided human development over the past several centuries. 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 to overcome the core problem: we've lost our moral mission and compassionate focus in our scientific endeavors. Gleiser argues that we're using the wrong paradigm to relate to the universe and our position in it. In this deeply researched and beautifully rendered book, he calls for us to embrace a new life-centric perspective, one which recognizes just how rare and precious life is and why it should be our mission to preserve and nurture it. The Dawn of a Mindful Universe addresses the current environmental and scientific impasses and how the scientific community can find solutions to them. Gleiser's paradigm rethinks the ideals of the Enlightenment, and proposes a new direction for humanity, one driven by human reason and curiosity whose purpose is to save civilization itself. Within this model, we can once again see ourselves as the center of the universe--the place where life becomes conscious--and regain a clear moral compass which can be used to guide both science and the politics around it.

The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future

Self-Help

Gleiser, Marcelo

Personal Transformation

HarperOne

The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience

Politics & Social Sciences

Frank, Adam

Thompson, Evan

Philosophy

The MIT Press

Blind Spot

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press

A compelling argument for including the human perspective within science, and for how human experience makes science possible. "This is by far the best book I've read this year." --Michael Pollan, Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction, Harvard University; #1 New York Times bestselling author It's tempting to think that science gives us a God's-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes--rather than ignores or tries not to see--humanity's lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism. Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we're going, but we've gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally "see" the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine. The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

A tour through the celestial apocalypse, from Revelations to the "Big Crunch," covers such topics as the impact of comets and asteroids on Earth, the implications of eclipses and black holes, and the ultimate fate of the universe. 30,000 first printing.

The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time

Religion & Spirituality

Religious Studies

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

"An intellectual accomplishment that illuminates the magic and the wisdom of the heavens above."―Kirkus Reviews "Tracing our contemplation of the cosmos from the big bang to the big crunch" (The New Yorker), Marcelo Gleiser explores the shared quest of ancient prophets and today's astronomers to explain the strange phenomena of our skies―from the apocalypse foretold in Revelations to modern science's ongoing identification of multiple cataclysmic threats, including the impact of comets and asteroids on earthly life, the likelihood of future collisions, the meaning of solar eclipses and the death of stars, the implications of black holes for time travel, and the ultimate fate of the universe and time. Presenting insights to cosmological science and apocalyptic philosophy in an "easily accessible" (Library Journal) style, Gleiser is "a rare astrophysicist as comfortable quoting Scripture as explaining formulas" (Booklist). K. C. Cole praises his ability to "[work] the entwined threads of science and religion into a vision of 'the end' that is strangely comforting and inspiring." 37 b/w illustrations

The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World

W.W.Norton&Company

Surveying scientists' and philosophers' ideas about the universe over the past twenty-five centuries, a prominent physicist plumbs the relationship between science and mythology, showing how recent theories of the universe's origin recall ancient creation myths.

The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang

Plume

Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth? To be human is to want to know, but what we are able to observe is only a tiny portion of what's out there.” In The Island of Knowledge, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited. These limits to our knowledge arise both from our tools of exploration and from the nature of physical reality: the speed of light, the uncertainty principle, the impossibility of seeing beyond the cosmic horizon, the incompleteness theorem, and our own limitations as an intelligent species. Recognizing limits in this way, Gleiser argues, is not a deterrent to progress or a surrendering to religion. Rather, it frees us to question the meaning and nature of the universe while affirming the central role of life and ourselves in it. Science can and must go on, but recognizing its limits reveals its true mission: to know the universe is to know ourselves. Telling the dramatic story of our quest for understanding, The Island of Knowledge offers a highly original exploration of the ideas of some of the greatest thinkers in history, from Plato to Einstein, and how they affect us today. An authoritative, broad-ranging intellectual history of our search for knowledge and meaning, The Island of Knowledge is a unique view of what it means to be human in a universe filled with mystery.

The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning

Reference

Basic Books

The Island of Knowledge

PublicAffairs

Dutton Adult

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