The Sentient Force. Teilhard de Chardin and the new science
Guillermo Agudelo Murguía; Juan Sebastián Agudelo
Towards the end of his book, The God Particle, Leon Lederman bemoans scientific illiteracy in our days. Only one in three people, he claims, can define a molecule or name a living scientist. And only two out of 23 randomly chosen Harvard students are able to explain why it is hotter in summer than in winter. Lederman's reaction, like the reaction of any educated adult, is quite common. Everyday, we read new communiques from pedagogues who tell us our high school graduates are reading at the level of fourth graders, and doing worse in their math than the children of other fourteen or fifteen nations in the globe. Like all parents, I lament the current state of education. The crisis in science education and the consequent scientific illiteracy that concerns policy makers and scientist alike is not only real, but detrimental to both society and the self, particularly, when the illiteracy is in regards to science, the tool by which we understand our place in the world.
Up to the middle ages, people were aware of the cosmologies that prevailed. These cosmologies, these explanations of our place here and awareness of a teleology were purely religious. Religion, in other words, gained its power because of its explicative capacities. It traced earth and society from its origin to its end. It explained natural phenomena. The rise of science as the prevailing mode to explain natural phenomena shook the religious foundations as far as religious cosmologies were concerned. All of a sudden, as the Renaissance began, we were not the center of the universe and within three centuries, we would find out that God had not necessarily molded us out of clay. In short, science's discoveries led us to reassess our role in the universe. We are able to understand who we are, where we are and what we are, built of thanks to science. Scientific illiteracy denies its victims any understanding whatsoever.
More important, however, scientific illiteracy has excluded us from a sense of place and purpose. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we made of? The ancient questions cannot be answered without at least a cursory understanding of evolution, ecology, phisics and chemistry. Yet the fault partly lies in science itself. Science has been blessed this century. If one were to tally the intellectual accomplishments of this century, every artistic achievement one can account for, there is a scientific one to match. And actually, if one considers the importance of relativity and quantum alone, the artistics revolutions of the century seem dwarfed. However, as most institutions, science has not been wise. Not only have important theories and discoveries been sleighed, but when accepted, they are not used as they should.
The community, instead of enlarging the scope and the well-being of society, has lost itself in petty arguments and an adamant, narrow academism. Like Becknesser, the dogmatic versifier who does not care for poetry but for counting feet and pointing out flawed forms in Wagner's Die Meistersinger, academic scientists refuse to project the implication of theories onto a larger scope. In many ways, it is fair to say that science has failed to include us. In other words, as an institution science has not created a discourse where the implications of theory and discovery can be understood or studied on our level. Instead, many have ran amok chasing a yet smaller particle, or an even stranger of science.
Biology: An old perspective
Máximo Sandín
The currently predominant scientific vision of the world originated in the "scientific revolution" begun in the XVI and XVII centuries by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton's theories. The technical and economic boom that produced the subsequent industrial revolution drove science towards a mechanistic, utilitarian approach to nature, the purpose of which was (and still is) to predict and control the studied phenomena.
Until then, the close contact with nature inherent to Western and other cultures' lifestyles had engendered an "ecological" vision of "Mother Earth". Scientific perception of the world was aimed at understanding the meaning of natural phenomena (in a religious or philosophical context) rather than trying to dominate them.
New knowledge from physics and ecology has highlighted the failure (and peril) of man's attempt to control nature, and suggests a need to return to an "old way of looking" at the world.
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Life and consciousness: Phenomena originated by the electromagnetic unity?
Cornelio González Valdenebro
Electricity and magnetism are simultaneously and indistinctly, the interiority of "things", and the exteriority of their descriptive languages which, being the same... are different! And/or at the obverse: being different... are the same!
When Man expresses himself linguistically -that is to say subjectively and externally-, in terms of space-time, he is doing it, simultaneously and objectively, as the mass-energy phenomenon of biological order which as Man he constitutes.
Space-time is the external (therefore discontinuous) human language for describing the continuous mass-energy interiority of Nature.
Evolution of the man
Francisco Carrillo
¿What evolutionary guidelines has the human species followed from its ancestors primates? And what evolutionary paths will our species continue in the future? The first question is of easier answer. To answer to the second, we can speculate with several alternatives.
What is Real? The subjective and the objective fact
Manuel de la Herrán Gascón
The popular criterion presuppose the existence of the objective and solid fact as the generator of the doubtful subjetive experience. But the process is just the inverse, and their characteristics the opposed. The subjetive experience (I see a tree) provoke us the creation of one hypothesis (There is a tree). The subjetive experience is real, there are no doubt about it. However the objective hypothesis is fruit of a combination of imagination and perception, susceptible of error, and always subject to revision. The existence of the perception is a certainty. The existence of the perceived fact is a hypothesis.
The Sentient Universe. In search of the theory of cosmic evolution
Guillermo Agudelo Murguía; Juan Sebastián Agudelo
This will be a book about science, about quantum, astrophysics, biology, and about the way in which one takes up where the other one leaves off; about what the many scientific discoveries of this tell us about ourselves and our role as a species in this planet, even in this cosmos. It is also a book about the ways in which many scientists have interpreted science and most importantly, about how some of them have strained and struggled to make science more than a mere mental exercise; how some actually have tried to make science answer the tough existential and ontological questions for us.
This book has a long history. It began with the reading of Teilhard de Chardin work and the realization that there was a disturbing discrepancy between what Teilhard de Chardin thought and what his scientific successors think without there necessarily being that many inaccuracies in Teilhard de Chardin's scientific work. There is something extremely exciting about our intellectual climate. Never in the history of the species have we had so many answers to what used to be the eternal questions. Never have we had so many coherent theories explaining every phenomenon that was mysterious even hundred years ago. We understand the brain. We have made tremendous inroads in the understanding of memory - that most mysterious of gifts. We have a pretty certain idea about the cosmos which puzzled our ancestors. We know its origin, its composition, its size. We know where we came from and how we came as we did. We know also the innermost secrets of matter and the atom. And still, despite the excitement in all this knowledge, never in our history has there been such sense of anomie in intellectual circles. Like revelers in one of those excessive banquets we find Roman historians describing, our thinkers seem bored, satiated: nothing will prod them. It is as if they've had too much stimulation. And with so many answers, it seems that there has never been such waste.
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