Author connects science and the brain

There were always two sides to his life, George Musser said at a Broad Street coffee counter last week.

A trained scientist, Musser, 59, is also a writer and the author of “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation,” a 2023 Farrar, Strauss and Girous publication about how the human brain sometimes reconfigures physical evidence to conform to its own way of thinking.

Born in Houston, Musser grew up in Warren Township and studied electrical engineering and math at Brown University. At Cornell University, he received a masters in planetary science. But before the physical science degrees, he was a budding wordsmith.

“I do remember writing for my middle school newspaper,” he said. “And I wrote for the Watchung Hills Regional High School newspaper. In college, I wrote for the Brown Daily Herald and The Ithaca Times. The article I was best remembered for was on prostitution. I put in a classified to meet the women of the night and had some good
interviews.”

While working on his doctorate at Cornell, he saw a classified advertisement for a science editor with employment in San Francisco, a place he always wanted to live. He applied and got the job, but departed for California with difficulty because he was dropping out of the doctorate program. He went with his girlfriend and future wife, Talia, currently an English professor at CUNY. It was 1994.

He was editor of Mercury Magazine, a publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. After four years, he landed back East, in Hoboken, married, and the astronomy and physics editor for Scientific American.

“At Scientific American, we had lots of fun,” he said while sipping an Oreo Shake. “This was during the time of a revolution in cosmology. Cosmology is about the universe in its entity. It’s beyond stars and galaxies. To the cosmologist, a galaxy is just a pin prick.”

This revolution started in 1997, Musser said. In the 1960s, scientists understood that the universe was expanding. But they also thought the expansion was slowing down. But that was wrong, they learned. The expansion was accelerating.

“All we know about the universe is from tiny, tiny amounts of light we see through a telescope,” he said. “And not much light, either. The cosmologist is essentially a detective. What was detected in 1997-98 was one tiny change in the color of the light.”

Musser said we know the sun is yellow in color, but other stars are different colors. The closer the light, the bluer it is. The further away, the redder it becomes.

“It was happening everywhere,” he said of the reddening starlight. “It was the pattern of the universe. It was telling you the universe was flying apart.”

Because of his fascination for cosmology, he became more interested in physics. Musser is also the author of two books on physics. In the course of writing them, he understood that physics was leaving out human perception.

“The field of modern physics goes back to Issac Newton,” he said, “when it was thought that physics, the study of the material world, was independent of human thought.

That the laws of physics didn’t depend on the person. That’s still basically correct, but there are some places where it has to be modified.”

Musser said the change in understanding came with Albert Einstein.

“He recognized there were aspects Newton was missing,” Musser said, “and that turned into two things: Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and his Quantum Theory. They both recognized you have to consider the place of the person in the theory.”

Science is still the big, chaotic swirl of ideas like it was a century ago, Musser said, when there was Einstein in science, Picasso in the visual arts and other thinkers upsetting their terra firma. Musser said he tries to capture the interconnection of various disciplines in, “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation.”

“In the book, the ideas of physics connect to psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, philosophy,” he said. “Different cultures are interconnected.”

Musser, who started work on the book in 2018, has also written, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory” and “Spooky Actions at a Distance.”

“I love ideas and hope I can share them with people,” he said. “People think science is a set of facts. I think of it as a process.”

  George Musser, Glen Ridge, physics