A dozen Galileo Project members gathered in the backyard of my home this weekend. We celebrated the conclusion of a historic week since the Project was conceived a year ago, inspired by Galileo Galilei’s legacy of finding answers to fundamental questions by looking through new telescopes. They all told me…

This month two young astrophysicists with faculty appointments told me that they are seriously considering leaving academia because of peer pressure to conform with the majority view or suffer reputational risk. They know that the tenure system was supposed to promote risky investments in independent thought by providing job security…

Despite what you might read in history books about the past ten thousand years of human civilization, we really owe our existence to three unsung heroes from the early beginning of the universe, a million times further back in time. First and foremost is dark matter. Since Fritz Zwicky realized…

There is a symmetry between the beginning and end of our life. At both times we are helpless and need support from our environment to survive. And both moments represent a diminished version of our mental and physical self. In his recent New York Times podcast, Ezra Klein discussed a…

Humanity constructed the first nuclear reactor eighty years ago. Yet, there was no immediate evidence back then that the first terrestrial reactor attracted attention from extraterrestrial civilizations. This is understandable. Nature manufactures nuclear reactors of much greater scales in the form of stars, and so our accomplishment was not particularly…

On June 4, 2021, NASA’s leading Administrator Bill Nelson said on CNN that scientists should study the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The following morning, I emailed Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, about possible funding of a scientific research project that would make his boss happy…

“You look younger than we remember you”, commented one of my former graduate students as I entered the reception for the conference in celebration of my 60th birthday at the Winnetu resort in Martha’s Vineyard. “The pandemic had a positive impact on my health”, I replied, “I jog every early…

A common misperception of kids is that they are not as intelligent as adults because they make mistakes. But the truth is that they merely lack experience and so they get bruised when faced with challenges in a reality that is not familiar to them. The bruising hurts but it…

Along our way to attend an astrophysics conference for my 60th birthday, we took a ferry ride from Cape Cod in Massachusetts. As the ferry sailed into the ocean, we noticed faster boats passing by. It then occurred to me that all the spacecraft launched by humanity in its first…