Adam Frank

Frank recalls falling in love with astronomy at five through the covers of his father’s science-fiction magazines; his father’s explanation of a thunderstorm later gave him a love of science itself.⁠[1]

He received a cum laude B.S. in physics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1984.⁠[2]

He received his PhD in physics from the University of Washington in 1992.⁠[3]

His doctoral thesis, advised by Bruce Balick, dealt with the radiation gasdynamics of planetary nebulae.⁠[2]

After his PhD he held postdoctoral and visiting scientist positions at Leiden University and the University of Minnesota.⁠[3]

As a postdoc he was awarded a Hubble Fellowship.⁠[4]

He became an assistant professor at the University of Rochester in 1996, associate professor in 2000 and professor in 2004.⁠[2]

His research is in theoretical astrophysics, particularly the hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic evolution of matter ejected from stars, and with colleagues at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics he has carried out plasma astrophysics research.⁠[5]

In 1997 he received an NSF CAREER award.⁠[4]

His computational research group at Rochester developed advanced supercomputer tools for studying how stars form and how they die.⁠[6]

Also active as a popular science writer, he received the science-writing prize of the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Physics Division in 1999.⁠[5]

In January 2009 the University of California Press published his first book, The Constant Fire; that year his work appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009, and the book was named one of SEED magazine’s best picks of the year.⁠[4]

The book seeks to move beyond the conflict between science and religion by treating both as sacred pursuits of “the True and the Real.”⁠[7]

Reviewing it in America magazine, theologian Ilia Delio praised its clear account of science but argued that the author was poorly informed about religion and its encounter with science.⁠[8]

Marcelo Gleiser recalls that when Frank visited Dartmouth in fall 2009 to promote The Constant Fire, the two agreed to start a blog; after connecting with NPR they opened 13.7: Cosmos and Culture on December 16, 2009, with three essays.⁠[9]

About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang, published in 2011, sets the history of theories of the universe’s origin alongside changes in how humans experience time, and discusses newer ideas such as time with no beginning, parallel universes and eternal inflation.⁠[10]

He served as science consultant on Marvel’s film Doctor Strange, helping explain the source of the hero’s powers within the physical rules of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; he proposed looking to consciousness rather than neuroscience, drawing on what David ChalmersDavid ChalmersDavid Chalmers is an Australian-born philosopher and cognitive scientist and University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, known for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness and for proposing the extended mind thesis with Andy Clark.Open the full entry called “the hard problem of consciousness.”⁠[11]

In September 2017 a team he led proposed in the journal Anthropocene a new classification that, unlike the Kardashev scale’s focus on energy use alone, accounts for the feedback of a civilization’s energy harvesting on its planet; it ranks planets in five classes and places Earth between Class IV and Class V.⁠[12]

The 13.7 blog, which he maintained for seven years, ended in April 2018; it had attracted more than 13 million visits a year.⁠[13]

On April 10, 2018, he and NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry climate scientist Gavin A. Schmidt posted The Silurian Hypothesis on arXiv, asking whether an industrial civilization that existed millions of years ago would leave detectable traces today and proposing tests to distinguish an industrial cause from a natural climate event; the paper was accepted by the International Journal of Astrobiology.⁠[14]

In June 2018 he, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Marina Alberti and Axel Kleidon published a mathematical model in Astrobiology that, drawing partly on cases such as Easter Island, simulates how a civilization and its planet co-evolve; it found four scenarios: die-off, sustainability, collapse without resource change, and collapse despite resource change.⁠[15]

Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth went on sale on June 12, 2018; it traces thinking about alien life from the ancient Greeks to the present and argues for understanding climate change and the fate of human civilization in a cosmic context.⁠[16]

Published by Norton in 288 pages, the book was described by Publishers Weekly as an evenhanded exploration of “the astrobiology of the Anthropocene.”⁠[17]

Reviewing it for NPR, Adam Becker found the last part of the book the strongest, while noting that claiming a new story could solve the geopolitical problems behind climate change seemed somewhat facile.⁠[18]

Light of the Stars received the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science, and he was selected for the American Physical Society’s 2020 Joseph A. Burton Forum Award for his multi-channel promotion of public understanding of physics and of the relationship between science and society.⁠[19]

In 2020 he received a NASA grant to study “technosignatures,” the first NASA non-radio technosignature grant; with collaborators including Jason Wright, Manasvi Lingam and Ravi Kopparapu he produced the first entries in an online technosignature library for astronomers to compare against.⁠[20]

In August 2021 the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences announced that he would receive the 2021 Carl Sagan Medal for excellence in public communication in planetary science, presented at its 53rd annual meeting, held virtually in October 2021.⁠[21]

On February 7, 2022, he, David Grinspoon and Sara WalkerSara Imari WalkerSara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, a professor at Arizona State University and deputy director of its Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, who studies the origin of life, a physical definition of life and the detection of alien life, and who has developed assembly theory with the chemist Lee Cronin.Open the full entry published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology treating intelligence as a collective property that can operate at planetary scale and arguing that the emergence of technological intelligence may be a transition that happens to a whole planet.⁠[22]

Harper published The Little Book of Aliens on November 21, 2023; Kirkus Reviews said it balanced solid data with reasoned conjecture, while finding the author’s enthusiasm occasionally over-exuberant.⁠[23]

The book covers the scientific origins of the search for intelligent life, the Fermi Paradox, the Kardashev Scale, the James Webb telescope, and UFOs and their conspiracy theories.⁠[24]

The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, written with physicist Marcelo Gleiser and philosopher Evan Thompson, was published by the MIT Press in 2024; it argues that science must treat lived human experience as an inescapable part of the search for objective truth.⁠[25]

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, philosopher Robert P. Crease praised the book as clear and witty but noted that many of its arguments were not new and that parts of the discussion were somewhat repetitive.⁠[26]

In January 2024 he and Amedeo Balbi of the University of Rome Tor Vergata published a study in Nature Astronomy introducing the “oxygen bottleneck,” arguing that access to open-air combustion determines whether a civilization can develop advanced technology.⁠[27]

The paper states that in Earth-like atmospheres open-air combustion requires an oxygen partial pressure of at least 18%, a limit higher than that needed to sustain a complex biosphere.⁠[28]

On October 15, 2024, the Berggruen Institute named him one of two English-language winners of its inaugural Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, sharing a $25,000 award, for The Coming Second Copernican Revolution, an essay arguing that humanity’s technosphere should co-evolve with the biosphere to achieve planetary intelligence.⁠[29]

On December 22, 2024, he appeared on episode 455 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing planet formation, the Drake equation, the Fermi Paradox, alien civilizations, colonizing Mars, the Kardashev scale, UFO sightings, the physics of life and the nature of time.⁠[30]

His current work covers life in the universe, technosignatures of exo-civilizations and the physics of life from an information-theory perspective; he is a CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry commentator and runs the 13.8 blog on BigThink.com.⁠[1]

He is also the author of the introductory textbook Astronomy: At Play in the Cosmos, in which each chapter is built around interviews with two scientists in a journalistic style.⁠[31]

The textbook, published by W. W. Norton, is a large-format volume of 544 pages.⁠[32]

Personal website: Public link: https://adamfrankscience.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

X: Public account: https://x.com/adamfrank4 (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

University of Rochester: Official website: https://www.rochester.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]