Press enter or click to view image in full sizeA watercolor with an insight about art and science by Albert Einstein: “Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings: admiring, asking, observing, there we enter the realm of art and science.” (Credit: Greg Wyatt)
The beauty of life as-we-know-it requires water and is marked by colors. We are grateful to the generosity of the initial conditions of the Universe that led to the creation of intelligent life out of a soup of chemicals on the surface of Earth. The brush that painted intelligent life on Earth may have created similar circumstances on billions of Earth-Sun analogs, yet to be discovered as a stippled watercolor image of the Milky-Way galaxy.
Once we find our siblings in the family of intelligent civilizations, we will likely feel a deeper connection to the cosmos. It would feel like home rather than the cold space conceived by cosmologists to contain lifeless entities with a purposeless evolution.
The colors of life are adequately captured in watercolors. The remarkably accomplished artist Greg Wyatt approached me unexpectedly with the wish to donate 50 framed stippled watercolor portraits of distinguished scientists and 2 bronze sculptures about Galileo Galilei to my office at the Harvard College Observatory. I am stunned by Greg’s amazing generosity, which he explained as being inspired by my scientific research.
The watercolors and bronze sculptures will be delivered to my office by the end of this week and then be unveiled to the public in a celebratory event on November 13, 2025. The brilliant composer in residence, David Ibbett, will present with his ensemble a new musical piece in celebration of this unusual celebration at the intersection of art and science.
Greg’s gift made my year. I cannot emphasize enough how deep my gratitude goes for the humbling fact that starting this week my research office will turn into an art museum. The 50 watercolors serve an important educational purpose for my students and postdocs, as each watercolor includes an inspiring insight by a prominent scientific pioneer. Greg’s stippled watercolors are composed of many dots that come together harmonically into a profound pattern.
The main lesson I draw from looking at Greg’s beautiful stippled watercolors is that in order to notice the signal, it is essential to ignore the noise. In scientific research, the signal is anomalies in data collected by instruments and the noise originates from the environment, including colleagues who refuse to imagine the unexpected. Premature convergence on the dismissal of anomalies has negative consequences on the efficiency of scientific discovery. For example, the popular suggestion that 1I/`Oumuamua is a comet when there was no evidence for gas or dust around it, relieved the impetus for collecting critical data for unraveling its true nature between November 2017 and January 2018. Since not enough data was collected, the nature of 1I/`Oumuamua remains unknown. The psychological tendency to dismiss anomalies promotes sustained ignorance rather than groundbreaking discoveries. Since interstellar objects spend a limited time in the inner solar system, it is essential to use all available observatories to study them. This was the main message conveyed in a new White Paper (accessible here) — calling for action regarding interstellar objects, that I submitted this week in collaboration with Omer Eldadi and Gershon Tenenbaum to the International Astronomical Union.
The unveiling event will share the following background materials with the audience:
Greg Wyatt: Why I Create Watercolors?
Before I created stripped watercolor portraits, I was fourteen and my father was a Professor of Painting and Art History at C.C.N.Y. During that summer I would join my father at C.C.N.Y. three times a week. Upon arrival at C.C.N.Y., he placed me in a drawing studio right next to his painting teaching studio and introduced me to the blind contour method of drawing.
My father explained that there was a very good Instructor at the Art Students League named Kimon Nicolaides who had recently published a book titled “The Natural Way to Draw”. As I was not familiar with this drawing book, my father explained that Kimon Nicolaides proposed a teaching method that emphasized drawing as a process of truly seeing and physically experiencing form, rather than copying appearances.
He believed that drawing is not just a visual activity but also a kinesthetic one, in which the artist learned about one’s coordination between the eye, mind and hand. My father stated that Nicolaides’ approach relied on exercises such as gesture drawing, contouring drawing and memory drawing, which were designed to allow students to feel the subject’s energy, movement and structure. He argued that by practicing these exercises with discipline and repetition, students would develop anintuitive grasp of form and space, and that learning to draw is not a formula but by a direct, lived response to what students actually see.
For instance, my father stated that Kimon Nicolaides emphasized that students must practice the blind contour method of drawing in which a student would draw the outline of an object without looking down at the paper, keeping their eyes fixed only on the object being observed. This exercise emphasizes closer observation and trains the hand to follow the eye, thereby strengthening the connection between seeing and drawing rather than focusing on achieving a polished result.
When I tried the blind contour method my results produced abstract and distorted looking images, but after practicing the blind contour method of drawing for several weeks I learned that its value lies in sharpening visual perception, and the coordination between the eye, mind and hand. With this method of drawing, depending on how to create a stippled watercolor portrait, artists should first consider their choices of watercolor paper, for there are basically two types of watercolor paper, cold pressed and hot pressed.
Watercolor paper falls broadly into two distinguished categories, the smooth refinement of hot pressed and the textured richness of cold pressed. Cold pressed watercolor paper has a more moderate absorbency which allows water and pigment to soak into the paper without spreading uncontrollably. This watercolor paper is across the board choice for professional artists who paint flowers and most traditional subjects.
For the reasons that I have stated above, I prefer to use hot pressed watercolor paper which is less absorbent, causing the water and paint to dry more slowly, which in turn allows artists more control when they wish to mix pigments together towards a very expressive medium. Hot pressed paper is the type of watercolor paper that is used by artists to gain the finest details in the modeling of nature’s forms, human anatomy and creating the illusion of three-dimensional portraits.
The stippled watercolor process begins with a very careful foundation, since the process depends on precision and patience. Those artists who decide to use a rapidograph pen rather than a pencil, it because a rapidograph pen is a specialized instrument known for producing precise and fine lines, commonly used in architectural drawing and stippled watercolor portraits.
Artists that use rapidograph pens allow them to place on the watercolor paper many small dots to build up tones, textures and forms. Instead of traditional shading techniques, artists can use the radiograph pen for focusing the placement of dots to indicate light and shadow.
Without a doubt, the stippled watercolor process used by artists is performed slowly and patiently enabling them to select watercolor pigments that amplify the spatial depth surrounding natural forms. For instance, when artists create stippled watercolor portraits, the cool tones can suggest shaded areas, while warmer hues can bring out highlights. As these artists maintain a sense of direction in their stippling, they follow the natural contours of the face so that the facial textures support the anatomical forms rather than flattening them.
Once the basic values and tones are in place artists can enrich the portrait by the layering of colors. Instead of blending them on a palette, these artists place complementary or contrasting rapidograph pen dots side by side, which allows the eye to mix them from a distance into a pointillistic watercolor portrait. This technique gives the portrait vibrancy and texture while preserving the crisp character of each of the created dots.
To keep the edges defined, artists vary the size and concentration of the dots — smaller and tighter dots for sharp features like eyes, nostrils and lips, larger and more diffuse dots for creating softer transitions as with cheeks and hair. The result is a portrait that reads as luminous and detailed when viewed from afar, yet reveals its dot-by-dot craftsmanship with a closer view.
Adding quotations from insightful and intelligent people can enrich the creation of stippled watercolor portraits by providing a deeper layer of reflection and inspiration. Watercolor pigments, with their fluidity and unpredictability, often mirror the complexities of thought and emotion that frequently resonates and provides reflections with the insights and emotions conveyed by these wise words
I also admire nineteenth century French painters who practiced pointillism, such as with George Seurat, who practiced pointillism which was a revolutionary painting technique characterized by the meticulous application of small, distinct dots of pure color placed closely together on the canvas. Rather than blending pigments on a palette, Seurat relied on the viewer’s eye and mind to optically mix the colors at a distance, producing luminous effects and subtle gradations of tone. Rooted in scientific theories of color and perception, pointillism gave his works of art a shimmering, almost vibrating quality.
Paul Signac, a French nineteenth artist was a key figure in the development of pointillism, who worked alongside George Seurat to refine the technique into what became widely known as Neo-Impressionism. While Seurat introduced the method of painting with small dots of pure color, Signac expanded it into a broader, more expressive brushstrokes made of small, distinct touches that still relied on optical blending. His use of vibrant, carefully arranged colors gave his paintings a luminosity which was used when he depicted seascapes, harbors and Mediterranean expansive views.
Henry Matisse, a French nineteenth artist experimented with pointillism early in his career, particularly in the 1890’s when he was influenced by Paul Signac and the Neo-Impressionists. Matisse applied small, distinct strokes and dabs of pure color to capture shimmering light and vibrant harmony, echoing the pointillist method. However, unlike Seurat’s rigorous scientific precision, Matisse used the technique more freely and expressively, treating color as an emotional force rather than an optical effect.
Creating a stippled watercolor portrait of Galileo Galilei, combines artistic techniques with historical reverence, and because of this statement, stippled watercolor portraits result in a work of art that celebrates both science and art. By incorporating Galileo’s own quotations into a stippled watercolor portrait of him allows the artwork to transcend a mere portrait representation, becoming instead a meditation on his enduring vision. His words, such as “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them”. This quotation resonates with the stippling watercolor portrait process itself, where countless tiny marks gradually reveal form and meaning. Each rapidograph pen dot becomes both a gesture of artistic patience and an echo of the artist’s pursuit of discovery, binding the visual and intellectual together.
By surrounding Galileo’s likeness with the very phrases that shaped his legacy, the stippled watercolor portrait gains a voice, inviting viewers not only to see Galileo as he appeared, but to feel the rhythm of his thoughts, the poetry of his science, and the timeless search for truth that defined his life and legacy.
Press enter or click to view image in full sizeA watercolor of the face of Galileo Galilei after he looked at the four moons of Jupiter. (Credit: Greg Wyatt)
Avi Loeb: Why I Became a Scientist Who Loves Watercolors?
(Chapter 2: “The Farm”, from the bestselling book “Extraterrestrial”, Harper-Collins 2021; translated to 27 languages)
One of my earliest memories is of arriving a little late to school for my first day of first grade. When I walked into the classroom, the kids were running around and jumping on their chairs and even their desks. It was pandemonium.
My reaction was curiosity. I looked at my classmates and thought, Should I join them? Does it make sense to behave like this? Why are they doing this? Why would I? I stood by the door for a moment, trying to think my way through the questions.
The teacher came in a few seconds later. To say she was unhappy was an understatement. This was not how she wanted the new school year to begin. Attempting to assert her authority and calm down the students, she saw in me a chance to set things right. “Look at how well-behaved Avi is,” she said to the class. “Can’t you all follow his example?”
But my placidity was not a sign of virtue. I hadn’t decided that the right thing to do was to stand quietly and await the teacher’s arrival; I just hadn’t figured out whether it would make sense for me to join in the mayhem.
I wanted to tell the teacher this but did not, which I now think was unfortunate. The lesson my classmates might have learned from my behavior — a lesson I eventually learned myself and that I have since tried to teach my own students — wasn’t about whether you should or shouldn’t follow the crowd but rather that you should take time to figure things out before acting.
In deliberation, there is the humility of uncertainty. This, too, is an attitude toward life that I have worked to embrace, cultivate in my students at Harvard, and instill in my daughters. After all, it is what my parents sought to instill in me.
•••
I grew up in Israel on our family’s farm in Beit Hanan, a village about fifteen miles south of Tel Aviv. It is an agricultural community dating back to 1929, and shortly after its founding it boasted 178 inhabitants. By 2018, however, that number had increased to only 548. When I was a child, the village was defined by its orchards and greenhouses, which grew all kinds of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It was also a moshav, a special type of village. Unlike a kibbutz, where land is farmed communally, a moshav consists of individual families who own their own farms.
Our farm was notable for its large field of pecan trees — my father was head of Israel’s pecan industry — but we also grew oranges and grapefruit. When I was young, the pecan trees, which can grow to over one hundred feet, towered over me, but the citrus trees, with their distinctive, sharp odor when the fruit was ripe, rarely got above ten feet and were easier to climb.
Tending the groves and overseeing the necessary machinery was a full-time occupation for my father, David, who was a skilled problem solver. Indeed, I remember him most through objects: the tractors he maintained, the trees of our orchards he nursed, the appliances he mended throughout our home and farm. A particularly clear memory I have was his climbing atop the roof of our house in the summer of 1969 to ensure that the reception for our television would allow us to watch Apollo 11’s lunar landing.
No matter how able my father was, the sheer extent of work meant that there remained plenty of daily chores for my two sisters and me. We raised chickens, and at a very young age I collected eggs every afternoon and spent many nights with a flashlight hunting down fluffy chicks that had escaped from their cages.
Israel in the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of my earliest years, was a precarious place. After World War II, Jewish refugees increased the population by about a third, and the number of people in the region went from two million to just over three million. Many came from Europe, and the echoes of the Holocaust were never absent. What’s more, the Arab countries of the Middle East were resolutely hostile toward Israel, which was committed to holding its ground. One conflict followed another: the Sinai War of 1956 was followed by the Six-Day War of 1967, which was followed by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Though only decades old at the time of my childhood, Israel was steeped in recent and ancient history, and Israelis then — as now — were aware that their nation’s continued survival depended on deliberating over the consequences of their choices.
It is also a beautiful country, and Beit Hanan and my family’s farm were splendid places to grow up in. This free atmosphere inspired my early writings, notes I collected and piled in the top drawer of my desk. Indeed, for much of my adulthood it was an animating faith for me that if my freethinking ways ever got me into trouble, I could always, and very happily, return to the farm of my childhood.
It is commonly thought that life is a collection of the places you visit. But this is an illusion. Life is a collection of events, and these are the results of choices, only some of which are ours to make.
There are, of course, continuities. The science I do is connected by a direct line to my childhood. It was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions in life, enjoying the beauty of nature, and, among the orchards and the close neighbors of Beit Hanan, not caring about my status or standing.
•••
The chain of causation that brought me to Beit Hanan began, approximately, with the decision of my grandfather (and, in Hebrew, my namesake) Albert to flee Nazi Germany. More clear-eyed than many, he foresaw the likelihood of cataclysm, the fast-moving drift of events that, even before the outbreak of the Second World War, promised an ever-narrowing range of choices for Jews, an ever-growing risk of dire consequences if he did not select the right path.
Luckily for him, and for me, Albert made the right choice. He left Germany in 1936 and moved to Beit Hanan shortly after its founding. Although it was largely unsettled and, like the world, buffeted by the rising winds of war, the farming community was a comparatively safe haven. Soon after his arrival, he was joined by my grandmother Rosa and their two sons, one of whom was my father, then age eleven. When he transitioned from a German to a Jewish society, his name was changed from Georg to David.
My mother, Sara, came to Beit Hanan from afar as well. She was born and raised in Haskovo, near the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. The coincidence of geography that made her a Bulgarian and not a German saved her and her family during the war; although it allied itself with the Nazi regime, Bulgaria retained its sovereignty and thus some of its ability to resist Adolf Hitler’s mounting demands for the country to deport its Jews to Germany. As the rumors of death camps circulated, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church protested deportations, and the Bulgarian king summoned the resolve to refuse Germany’s requests. To be clear, he did so by declaring that Bulgaria needed its Jews for its own labor pool, but the consequence was that he managed to protect many of the nation’s Jews. My mother was therefore able to enjoy a relatively normal childhood. She studied at a French monastery school and eventually entered college in Sofia. But in 1948, with postwar Europe a ruin and the Soviet Union expanding westward, she left school and emigrated with her parents to the new nation of Israel.
Beit Hanan’s earliest founders were from Bulgaria, so the fact that Sara’s family ended up there was not surprising. But the farm village was very different from the cosmopolitan city and university studies she had left behind. Her new home had its charms, however. Shortly after her arrival, Sara met my father. They fell in love, got married, and had three children — my two older sisters, Shashana (Shoshi) and Ariela (Reli), and, finally, me in 1962.
In those early years, my mother devoted herself to her family and the community. She was a locally renowned baker, and my wardrobe attested to her talent for knitting sweaters, but even in the relative isolation of Beit Hanan, she remained dedicated to a life of the mind. By this I mean not just a bookish interest in scholarship but a desire to apply her intellect to the world. And it was this, and her integrity, that caused her balanced judgments to be trusted by everyone who knew her, from the leadership of our village to visitors who came to our farm seeking her advice. I was a direct and daily beneficiary. She made clear how much she cared about my path in life, my choices and interests. Like a gardener watering and nurturing a plant, she was dedicated and meticulous in cultivating her children’s curiosity.
She also followed her own. When I was a teenager, she went back to university and completed her undergraduate degree. She then went on to graduate school, earning a PhD in comparative literature. These were not undertakings that kept her at a remove from us; indeed, at her encouragement, I sat in on her undergraduate philosophy classes, and at her urging I worked my way through many of the books on her reading lists.
It was my mother who caused me to fall in love with philosophy, especially existentialism. I dreamed of thinking for a living. On weekends, I would grab a work of philosophy, most often something by the existentialists, including the novels they wrote and inspired, and then, with my chosen book, I’d drive our tractor to a quiet spot in the hills and read for hours.
•••
It has occurred to me since these halcyon days on my family’s farm that if humanity ever finds a habitable planet on which to establish an outpost of our civilization, the people who populate it will likely look and act much like the people of Beit Hanan. As human history shows, the immediate demands of settling outposts of a civilization recur.
Of necessity, they would focus on the growing of food and the collective effort of supporting one another, from eldest to youngest. They would each need to be resourceful and multitalented, capable of repairing and engineering machinery, cultivating crops, and educating the young. I believe, too, that they would accommodate the life of the mind, even in their remoteness. And, I suspect that when their children came of age, they would be met with the same expectation I was contemplating: mandatory service to society.
My plan to become a philosopher and address some of the fundamental questions that humanity had grappled with for eons was delayed owing to Israel’s conscription of all citizens over the age of eighteen. Service was expected of everyone. Because I had shown promise in physics during high school, I was selected for Talpiot, a new program in which two dozen recruits per year worked in defense-related research combined with intense military training. My academic ambitions had to be set aside; the study of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the existential philosophers whom I’d read in my youth, did not fit the new role that had been assigned to me. Focusing on the study of physics was the closest I would get to an intellectually creative activity during my years of military service.
Though we wore the uniform of the Israeli Air Force, we were introduced to all branches of the Israeli Defense Forces. We underwent basic infantry training, took combat courses in artillery and engineering, and were taught how to drive tanks, carry machine guns on night-long treks, and parachute out of planes. Thankfully, I was athletically fit, so the physical challenges were demanding but bearable. And alongside these responsibilities, I avidly embraced my academic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Talpiot mandated that we study physics and mathematics, which sounded close enough to philosophy, and studying anything at the university seemed far more exciting than slogging through the muck with a rifle on my back. Given the opportunity, I did my best to justify the government’s faith in me. It was also at this time that I started to realize that while philosophy asked the fundamental questions, it often couldn’t resolve them. Science, I was learning, might put me in a better position to pursue answers.
•••
After three years of study and military training I was supposed to start working on an industrial or military project that had immediate practical applications. But I sought a more creative path, one that posed greater intellectual and research challenges. I visited a facility that was not on the official list of research destinations, then drew up an outside-the-box research proposal. By that time, I had established a track record of accomplishments, both in the classroom and in military training, and the Talpiot brass approved my idea — at first on a three-month trial basis and eventually for the remaining five years of my required service stint, from 1983 to 1988.
My work quickly evolved in new directions, some of which the military found quite intriguing. Through the thrill of scientific innovation, I developed the theory for a novel scheme (leading to a patent) to use an electric discharge in propelling projectiles to higher speeds than achievable with conventional chemical propellants. The project grew to employ an entire department of two dozen scientists and was the first international effort to receive funding from the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as “Star Wars,” the ambitious missile-defense concept announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.
At the time, the Cold War, the decades-old contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, between democracy and Communism, between West and East, seemed a fixed feature of world affairs. Both sides had amassed vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, sufficient to destroy each other many times over. The Doomsday Clock, the brainchild of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and intended to warn humanity of the likelihood of a man-made catastrophe, was almost always set at seven minutes to midnight.
SDI was one part of that much larger contest. It envisioned using lasers and other advanced weapons to destroy incoming enemy ballistic missiles, and though it was dissolved in 1993, it had a major political impact on hastening the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union.
This work also formed the backbone of my PhD dissertation, which I completed when I was twenty-four. The subject was plasma physics, which concerns the most common of the four fundamental states of matter; it’s the stuff of stars, lightning, and certain television screens. (In case you’re wondering, my dissertation was entitled “Particle Acceleration to High Energies and Amplification of Coherent Radiation by Electromagnetic Interactions in Plasmas” — a much less catchy title than this book’s, to be sure.)
•••
Even with my PhD in hand, I was unsure what my next choice should or would be. I wasn’t married to a career in plasma physics. There was always the attraction of returning to Beit Hanan. And a big part of me wanted to change course dramatically and return to philosophy. However, a chain of choices, only some of which were mine, set me on a different path.
It started on a bus ride during my military service. The physicist Arie Zigler, seated next to me, happened to mention that the most prestigious place for postgraduate work was the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. Later, during one of my visits to meet SDI officials in Washington, DC, and then at a plasma physics conference at the University of Texas at Austin, I crossed paths with the “pope of plasma physics,” Marshall Rosenbluth. I knew that his past academic home was the institute, and I asked him for details. He quickly endorsed the idea that I go there for a short visit. Inspired, I immediately called Michelle Sage, the administrative officer at IAS, and asked if I could visit that coming week. She replied, “We do not allow just anyone to visit us. Please send me a copy of your CV and I will let you know if you can visit.”
Undaunted, I mailed her a list of my eleven publications and called her again a few days later. This time she allowed me to schedule a visit at the end of my stay in the United States. When I arrived at her office early on the appointed morning, Michelle said, “There is only one faculty member here with available time, Free- man Dyson. Let me introduce you.”
I was thrilled. I remembered Dyson’s name from my textbooks on quantum electrodynamics. Soon after I sat down with Freeman in his office, he said, “Oh, you are from Israel. Do you know John Bahcall? He likes Israelis.” He must have seen the curiosity on my face, for he elaborated: “His wife, Neta, is Israeli.” I confessed that I had never heard of the man, let alone of his wife, Neta.
John Bahcall was an astrophysicist, I learned, and shortly thereafter I had lunch with him. It ended with him extending an invitation for me to return to Princeton for a month long visit. I learned that in the interim, he undertook an overseas reconnaissance, asking the most notable Israeli scientists, such as Yuval Ne’eman, what they thought of me. Whatever he was told, at the end of my second visit, John invited me to his office and offered me a prestigious five-year fellowship — but on the condition that I study astrophysics.
Of course, I said yes.
•••
When I was first encouraged to dedicate my professional career to astrophysics, I didn’t even know what made the Sun shine. That Bahcall’s area of expertise was the generation of weakly interacting particles called neutrinos in the Sun’s hot interior made my ignorance about the topic all the more embarrassing. Up to that point, my focus had been on terrestrial plasmas and their more Earth-bound applications.
To be clear, Bahcall knew my area of past research. He extended the offer despite this fact. That he took the risk struck me as remarkable then and seems even more so now. (The state of academia has shifted since, and I doubt it would be possible to make a similar offer to a young scholar today.) I was and remain grateful. I accepted, determined to demonstrate that Bahcall’s instincts — as well as the instincts of all the remarkable scientists who had helped me along this path — were justified.
Although I had to work to learn the basic vocabulary of the field so that I could begin to write original papers, the area was familiar. Plasma is a state that matter reaches at high temperatures when atoms are broken into a sea of positively charged ions (atoms that have lost some electrons) and negatively charged free electrons. Even though most of the ordinary matter in the present-day universe (including the interiors of stars) is in a plasma state, the field focuses on laboratory conditions, which are considerably different than those in space. Playing to my strengths, the first major research frontier that I pioneered as an astrophysicist centered on
when and how the atomic matter in the universe was transformed into a plasma. So began my fascination with the early universe, the so-called cosmic dawn, or the conditions under which the very stars were formed.
After three years at IAS, I was encouraged to apply to junior faculty positions, including one at the Harvard astronomy department. I was their second choice. The department rarely offered tenure to junior faculty, so some candidates — including the person who was offered the job before me — thought twice about taking the position.
For my part, I gladly accepted. I recall thinking my decision through very clearly. I realized that if I wasn’t offered tenure, I could always go back to my father’s farm or take up my first academic love, philosophy.
I arrived at Harvard in 1993. Three years later, I received tenure.
•••
I have since come to believe that John Bahcall not only had faith that I could handle the shift from plasma physics to astrophysics but also saw in me a kindred spirit — or perhaps even a younger version of himself. Bahcall had entered college intending to study philosophy but quickly concluded that physics and astronomy provided a more direct route to the most basic truths of the universe.
I came to a parallel realization not long after bidding farewell to John and the institute. When I took the junior faculty job at Harvard University in 1993, I decided it was too late to make a big career shift back into philosophy. More importantly, I had grown convinced that my “arranged marriage” to astrophysics had actually reunited me with my old love; it was just dressed up in different clothes.
Astronomy, I was coming to understand, addresses questions that were previously restricted to the realms of philosophy and religion. Among these questions are the biggest of the big — “How did the universe begin?” and “What is the origin of life?” I have also found that staring out into the vastness of space, contemplating the start and end of everything, provides a framework for answering, “What is a life worth living?”
Often the answer is staring us in the face. We need only summon the courage to admit it. During a visit to Tel Aviv in December of 1997, I had a blind date with Ofrit Liviatan. I liked her immediately, an appreciation that changed everything. Despite the geographical distance between us, we allowed our friendship to deepen. I had never met anyone like her and was convinced that I never would.
Long before I confronted the evidence presented by ‘Oumuamua, I had learned that across all facets of life, taking the evidence presented to you and pursuing it with wonder, humility, and determination can change everything — if, that is, you are open to the possibilities contained in the data. Happily, by this point in my life, I was.
Ofrit and I were married two years later and, like me, she eventually found her place in the orbit of Harvard, serving as director of the university’s freshman seminar program. In our old house near Boston, which was constructed just before Albert Einstein derived his theory of special relativity, Ofrit and I have raised our two daughters. That a causal chain runs from my grandfather’s decision to leave Germany in 1936 to my parents’ meeting in Beit Hanan to Ofrit and I raising Klil and Lotem suggests to me that only a thin line separates philosophy, theology, and science. Watching children step slowly into adulthood reminds me that the most mundane acts of our existence suggest something miraculous that can be traced back to the Big Bang.
Over time, I have come to appreciate science slightly more than philosophy. Whereas philosophers spend a great deal of time inside their own heads, scientists are all about having a dialogue with the world. You ask nature a series of questions and listen carefully to the answers from experiments. When done frankly, it is a usefully humbling experience. The success of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was not due to its formal elegance, which was developed over a series of publications from 1905 to 1915. It was not accepted until 1919, when Sir Arthur Eddington, secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society in England and an astronomer in his own right, confirmed the theory’s prediction that the Sun’s gravity would bend light. For scientists, what remains of a theory after its contact with data is what is deemed beautiful.
Although I am wrestling with the existential questions of my youth in a markedly different way than Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus did, I believe the boy on the tractor in the hills of Beit Hanan would have been pleased with this outcome. He would have admired the sequence of opportunities and choices that started with a blind date and led to a family.
But I understand, in a way that my younger self could not, another lesson of our family’s story, one that I have kept at the front of my mind in recent years as I study interstellar visitors to our solar system.
Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path. Life turns on your seeing clearly what’s in front of you.
•••
I believe that my life’s unusual path prepared me for my encounter with ‘Oumuamua. From a scientific standpoint, my experience taught me the value of freedom and diversity, specifically in the choice of research topics and the selection of collaborators, respectively.
The benefits of astronomers speaking with sociologists and anthropologists and political scientists and, of course, philosophers can be tremendous. Yet I have learned that in academia, interdisciplinary careers often share the fate of rare seashells swept onto the shore: if someone doesn’t pick them up and preserve them, they erode over time until unrelenting ocean waves render them into indistinguishable grains of sand.
Throughout my own career, there have been many times when I could have been diverted to different, less fortuitous paths. My professional life has introduced me to many scholars who have qualifications similar to mine but who have not enjoyed opportunities similar to mine. An honest survey of faculty across academia brings to mind men and women whose contributions are defined by opportunities extended and opportunities taken away. The same can be said of nearly all walks of life.
Knowing that I have been the beneficiary of individuals who have extended such opportunities, I am deeply committed to helping young people fulfill their potential, even when that means challenging not just orthodox ideas but, sometimes, more pernicious orthodox practices. As part of this mission, I have worked hard to maintain — in my teaching and in my research — an approach to the world that some might consider childlike. If people think that, I won’t take offense. In my experience, children follow their inner compasses more honestly and with fewer pretensions than many adults do. And the younger people are, the less likely they are to curb their thoughts to mirror the actions of others around them.
This approach to science has opened me up to some of the more ambitious — some might say audacious — possibilities inherent in the topics I study. For instance, the idea that ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar object spotted tumbling across the sky in October 2017, was not a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Press enter or click to view image in full sizeA watercolor with a statement by Tycho Brahe, a respected astronomer speaking on behalf of the scientific community: “It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.” (Credit: Greg Wyatt)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Press enter or click to view image in full size(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)
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.