About this item
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 whats 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.
About the Author
Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is a world-renowned theoretical physicist, the author of over 100 scientific papers and five popular science books in English, translated in over 15 languages. He is fascinated with questions of origins: of the universe, of matter, and of life-- the main topics of his research.
Marcelo is the co-founder of the Science and Culture blog 13.7, hosted by NPR, and appears frequently in TV documentaries and radio interviews and series, including Radiolab, Fresh Air, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, as well as many Discovery and BBC shows. He has contributed dozens of essays and opeds to the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, etc.
Marcelo is the director of the brand new Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, an effort to bring the sciences and the humanities into constructive dialogue, offering many public events. You can check it at http://ice.dartmouth.edu.
When he is not teaching, doing research, or writing, Marcelo runs the mountain trails of New Hampshire and Vermont, and competes in ultra-marathons and obstacle races, especially Spartan races.
If you want to know more about Marcelo's activities please visit his official web page: www.marcelogleiser.com
and his blog on science and culture at National Public Radio: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/
You can also follow Marcelo on twitter: http://twitter.com/MGleiser
And on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marcelo-Gleiser/181684578568436
