Works of Love
Science is a rare job which offers joy through the creative process of figuring out nature while being paid for it. In many other jobs, workers get paid for work that they would quit if they were handed a fortune.
Gladly, my day job as a scientist is a work of love. I would keep figuring out nature even if Elon Musk handed me half a trillion dollars. My source of happiness cannot be traded for money.
For that reason, I was surprised when a group of fundraisers approached me this week with the proposal of placing my creative work on Medium.com, accessible for free at https://avi-loeb.medium.com/ , under a paywall. I explained that my writings are a work of love that cannot be tainted by fundraising. If I were to write essays to my audience in order to make a profit, I would not be free to write about anything in any form I like. The fountain of creativity in science, literature or art stems from a fundamental sense of freedom. The minute you place the reins on a wild horse and force it to pull a carriage for financial benefits — that horse loses its natural beauty. With over a million readers per month, I insist on keeping my essays free for public consumption because my goal is science outreach and not money making.
An artist who works for hire with an agenda of making money feels like a person who makes love for money. Both activities are not sincere.
While this understanding is at the foundation of creative work in the arts and sciences, I was shocked to realize that it is not obvious to fundraisers and business people. This led me to wonder whether I should have started my career differently. Had I made large sums of money before becoming a scientist, I could have used my wealth to support my out-of-the-box research without needing to wish that someone else would appreciate it and pay for it.
Fortunately, all my scientific research over the past decade was supported by private foundations or donors who approached me out of the blue and said that they are inspired by my work and wish to support it. This was a repeating pattern among multiple billionaires who showed up at the front door of my home or among foundations who reached out to me on their own initiative. Aside from my own line of research, their generosity provided support for my mentees and colleagues in the research sphere around me, including Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative — for which I served as the founding director as well as the Galileo Project — which I lead. While chairing a senior faculty meeting as director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, I passed a motion to establish a new annual prize for the best PhD thesis in theoretical astrophysics. As soon as the motion was approved, the question arose on how to fund the prize. Within seconds, one of the attendees — Dr. Eric Keto, offered generously to fund the prize, which is now named the `Keto Prize’. This was the shortest fundraising campaign I had ever witnessed.
Altogether, I am grateful that my work of love is appreciated by donors. Personally, I never worried about becoming unemployed, since I always had the backup option of returning to my family’s farm and working within the embrace of nature to support my family. During my childhood, my father enjoyed his work in the orange and pecan fields. He was never occupied by concerns about what other people think and received his primary reward from his work within nature. My daily routine as a child included collecting eggs from our chickens, gathering oranges and pecans from our fields, and driving a tractor. I view this intimate connection to nature, be it in the form of a farmer who waters the soil and harvests its products or a scientist who tries to figure out how nature operates, as works of love.
With that perspective, I would never give up on the freedom of pursuing works of love for all the money in the world. In other words, I would not trade the freedom of a wild horse for the financial benefits of a workhorse.
Creative scientific work has its far-reaching rewards. If an interstellar object, like 3I/ATLAS, ends up being a cosmic tennis ball thrown by a cosmic neighbor, all the money in our world would not amount to much. On the temporal and spatial scales of billions of years and billions of light-years, our financial compensation on Earth is of little significance. It is not only true that we are not at the physical center of the Universe, but we are probably not at the intellectual center of the Universe. This realization will be the source of the next Copernican revolution. And realizing that there might be a smarter kid on our cosmic block with more creative goals than we possess, would hopefully bring us back to our senses and change our priorities. It is far more thrilling to approach the Universe with the curiosity of a kid than with the frozen mindset of an adult. Those who maintain their stature and self-esteem by pretending to be the adults in the room are the most boring people I ever met.
The future of humanity will be curated by new frontiers that are opened up through creative work. The higher purpose for our existence is our willingness to learn. And the best way to open new pathways for learning is through the creative work of imagining what lies beyond our horizon of down-to-Earth transactions. Those who dream about new worlds will bring us to the promised land in extraterrestrial territories that go beyond the Moon and Mars. In the grand scheme of the Universe, the imagination that fuels creative work in arts and sciences is priceless.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
