Matthew Civiletti's Research and Teaching Homepage
Welcome to my homepage! I am a physicist and educator, and I teach physics, astronomy and cosmology at Queens College at the City University of New York, where I am the Director of the Astronomy Program. I also build mathematical models to study several aspects of the universe; these include the universe's very early history, as well as possible solutions to the Fermi paradox. Please choose one of the following topics (classes are listed first):
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
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-attributed to Erwin Schrodinger
You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed—a palace at which one will not be able to put out one’s tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it even on the sly.
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-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Introduction to Cosmology (QC course)