On Being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation,

funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder.

Learn about the latest discoveries in the science of hope and optimism,

forgiveness and free will at templeton.org.

The astrophysicist Mario Libio spent 24 years at the Space Telescope Science Institute

of the Hubble Telescope, which has revealed the reality and beauty of the universe to scientists

and citizens in whole new ways. The Hubble's successor, the James Webb Telescope,

will soon be fully operational and further some of the questions about the early formation

of the universe and the origins of life to which Mario Libio has been devoted.

I spoke with him in 2010 while he was studying phenomena like dark energy and white dwarf stars.

And this has become an on-being classic, a conversation which imparted me across the years

with a thrilling sense of all we are learning about the cosmos in this generation in time,

our terrible earthly woes notwithstanding. Also, how scientific advance always meets recurrent

mystery from the emergence of life in the universe to the very heart of mathematics and the puzzle

of dark matter and dark energy. Until 1998, we didn't know that this dark energy exists.

And now, you know, we know it's the dominant form of energy of our universe.

So whenever you think that you have reached some sort of, you know, that you cannot go beyond,

okay, this is all that there is to know and so on, somehow we discover that there is yet something

even more mysterious that hides behind all of that. I'm Christopher Tippett and this is on being.

Mario Libio was born in Romania in 1945. His early childhood was framed by turmoil that came

of being born Jewish in Europe in that period. After what he describes as a few all of her

twist-like years, he settled with his mother in Israel where he became a physicist. He has written

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