Max Tegmark

Max Tegmark is a cosmologist who insists, with unshakeable conviction, that reality itself is made of mathematics. That immovable pillar of belief is pure Taurus Sun, the earthy Venusian bull who builds a foundation of values and opinions and then holds it against all comers; the universe itself could beg a Taurus to change his mind and be refused. He shines, as this Sun does, through the solid and the foundational: born in Sweden, degrees in physics and economics, a Berkeley doctorate, then tenure and a professorship at MIT, with over two hundred papers constraining the cosmos through the microwave background, galaxy surveys and the baryon acoustic oscillations he helped establish as a standard ruler. Yet the Taurus who prices and measures the material world carries a Pisces Moon, the ultimate empath and mystic, a sponge tuned to the source, receiving what feel like downloads from the universe. Here is the beautiful contradiction of him: the grounded bull whose inner life reaches toward the divine, whose Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is really a mystic's vision dressed in equations, and whose Piscean conscience now drives his warnings, through the Future of Life Institute, about humanity's place among the stars and the risks of the minds we are building.