Four of Dartmouth’s E.E. Just Scholars spent July 14 immersed in the science and history of Woods Hole’s Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), where pioneering cellular biologist Ernest Everett Just, Class of 1907, spent 20 summers conducting research. Just was one of Dartmouth’s earliest African American graduates.

A team of Dartmouth scientists and their colleagues have devised a breakthrough laser that uses a single artificial atom to generate and emit particles of light—and may play a crucial role in the development of quantum computers.

“When I got into science, my goal was ambitious but simple: to devise a theory that could explain ‘everything,’ at least everything about the physical world,” writes Dartmouth’s Marcelo Gleiser in a Washington Post opinion piece.

In a Wall Street Journal review of The Island of Knowledge, a new book by Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy, astronomer John Gribbin notes that Gleiser organizes his story about the endless search for knowledge and the development of science into three parts.

Before he had even set foot on the Dartmouth campus, theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander looked upon the E.E. Just Program as a priority. In March 2012, the newly hired faculty member said, “I regard the E.E. Just Program as a big mission of mine and it figured prominently in my decision to come here.”

Marcelo Gleiser is a professor of physics and astronomy and the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy. The author of four books in the U.S. and many more in his native Brazil, including a historical novel based on the life of the German scientist Johannes Kepler, Professor Gleiser talks with Dartmouth Now about the nature of the universe, fly fishing in Iceland, and what he’d be doing if he weren’t a professor.