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January 22 - February 18, 2023
The scientific brilliance of books by Aristotle such as his On the Heavens and Physics—the work from which the very discipline derives its name—is all too readily overlooked.
Newton’s physics is perfectly recognizable as an approximation of Einstein’s general relativity; Aristotle’s theory is perfectly recognizable as an approximation contained within the theory of Newton.
Our knowledge is the result of a continuous development of this dense web of exchanges. What interests us most is precisely this exchange: to compare, to exchange ideas, to learn and to build from difference. To mix, not to keep things separate.
He was regarded as a skillful amateur, capable of describing the different species of butterfly, being himself one of the last specimens of a type nearing extinction: nineteenth-century aristocrats who collected Lepidoptera as a pastime.
He was brilliant, the most brilliant—but he also had his limits, like everyone else. I think that the genius of Newton lay precisely in his being aware of these limits: the limits of what he did not know. And this is the basis of the science that he helped to give birth to.
Thanks to his book, this species of little creatures living on a marginal planet, of a peripheral star, in one of the billions of galaxies in the cosmos, realizes for the first time, with utter astonishment, that they are not the center of the universe.
What can the university offer us now? It can offer the same riches that Copernicus found: the accumulated knowledge of the past, together with the liberating idea that knowledge can be transformed and become transformative.
Revolution is an old mole that burrows deep into the soil of history. On occasion, it pops its head out. It is the fantasy of those who rule that nothing will change.
Despite the huge differences in specific attitudes, there was a prevailing awareness of belonging to the same great flow, of sharing a single great dream. Of being part of the same “struggle,” as it was commonly referred to at the time, to bring into existence a very different world.
Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.
We would avoid a great deal of foolishness, and society would gain significant advantages, if children were taught the fundamental ideas of probability theory and statistics: in simple form in primary school, and in greater depth in middle and high school.
The philosopher and mathematician Bruno de Finetti introduced in the thirties an idea that proved to be the key to understanding probability: probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow’s weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.
We are limited and mortal, we can learn to accept the limits of our knowledge—but we can still aim to learn and to look for the foundation of this knowledge. It is not certainty. It is reliability.
The arrogantly pragmatic and anti-philosophical attitude of Hawking and Weinberg, in fact, has its origins in . . . philosophy!
The reason that philosophical thought has this important role is the fact that the scientist is not a rational being with a fixed conceptual baggage who works on data and theories: he is a real being whose conceptual baggage is continuously evolving as our knowledge gradually grows.
we have nothing and no one with whom to compare consciousness or intelligence, beyond ourselves and our closest relatives. And this is where the octopus comes in.
Einstein did not just wake up one morning thinking that nothing was faster than light. Nor did Copernicus simply think up the idea that the Earth orbits the sun. Or Darwin that species evolve. New ideas do not just fall from the sky. They are born from a deep immersion in contemporary knowledge.
New knowledge emerges from present-day knowledge because within it there are contradictions, unresolved tensions, details that don’t add up, fracture lines.
The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else, and these are complementary and necessary aspects of the same profound intelligence: the audacity of thought, the courage to take risks, the lack of faith in received ideas—including, crucially, one’s own.
To prove that we humans did not evolve over millions of years to be as bestial as those ancient skeletons and our daily news seems to show. The disgust for war that many of us feel may be rooted in the instinctual mental fabric of our species.
Not that we don’t have national identities: we do have them. But each of us is a crossroads of multiple, layered identities. Putting the nation first means betraying all our other identities. Not because we are all equal in the world, but because we are different within each nation.
We are all siblings on this planet. And this is a fact, of the same order of certainty as that the Earth is round.
It doesn’t fall to everyone to prove Einstein wrong, or to successfully contradict and dissuade a pope. To have engaged with both individually, and to have convinced both that they had erred on such major issues, is surely something of a result. The Master really did have something to teach.
The siege mentality of the Church, its defense to the bitter end of its central role in public life, which we would like to see consigned to history, is a retrograde battle against science, revealing its incapacity to understand the beneficial and positive growth and evolution of morals. All of this has nourished, and still very much feeds into, the discrediting of the Church with many citizens.
last year I decided to try reading Lewis, even though I am not a philosopher and do not have all the necessary conceptual tools at my disposal.
Then what is this book
Like all major tendencies of thought, naturalism does not have a precise definition, and can be conjugated in a variety of ways. It can perhaps be characterized as the philosophical outlook that believes all existing facts can be investigated by the natural sciences, and that as human beings we belong to nature: we are not distinct entities that are separate from it.
Quantum mechanics cannot be squared with a naive realism, still less with any kind of idealism. So how should we think of it? Nāgārjuna provides a potential model: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence. In fact, true interdependence—and this is his key argument—requires that we forget autonomous essence altogether.
A main source of the emotions that give power to the right, and above all to the far right, is not the feeling of being strong. It is, on the contrary, the fear of being weak.
It is this reciprocal fear that inclines us to see others as less human, and that opens the way to an inferno.
A black hole therefore is in all likelihood not so black after all. It is a moderate source of heat. If it was isolated in the middle of a starless sky, it would not seem black but resemble instead a small sphere emitting a pallid light.
The heat that irradiates from black holes is today called “Hawking radiation.” It has never been observed, and it will be difficult to observe it anytime soon because it is so weak. But its existence has been vouchsafed in many different ways, and it is accepted as plausible by the vast majority of scientists.
With the lapse of eons of time, black holes themselves will end up evaporating and there will be nothing left but a universe of waves of light racing through nothingness for all eternity.
We can imagine a “recycling” of the universe in which the scale of distances vanishes and is redefined. Perhaps the immensity of the future universe is none other than the microcosm of the universe at its birth, just seen at a different scale, and our very own Big Bang is nothing but the infinite future of a preceding universe.
There are objections that we could be dealing with random fluctuations: after all, it is easy to see shapes in the clouds.
This is good science. And it is a healthy counterbalance to the many research programs that continue for decades without producing any definite predictions, stuck in the infinity of that sad limbo where theories can be neither verified nor proved to be false.
Whether they are anchored in the concrete possibility of being verified or not, the best ideas can be, and indeed have often been, the fruit of wholly irrational intuitions, almost of a vague empathy with the nature of things.
Perhaps the world would have been a better place if, instead of getting rid of the works of Democritus and preserving those of Aristotle, our forefathers had lost all copies of Aristotle’s books and managed to preserve those of Democritus instead.
In other words, while you decide freely whether to raise your left or your right finger, the decision is already predetermined, unknown to you, and at least several seconds before you think you are making it, by the biochemistry in your brain.
Jobs has said that “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life,” a phrase that I could echo.
I don’t like those whose belief in God gives them access to the Truth, because I believe that in reality they are as ignorant as I am. I think that the world is still a boundless mystery to us; I dislike those who have all the answers. I prefer those who are asking questions, and whose answer is: “I don’t really know.”
Cultivating fields, keeping cattle, building cities, reading books, erecting temples and cathedrals, surfing the internet, are all incredibly recent innovations by comparison. Perhaps we are not really used to the novelty of these things yet, to the discontents of civilization?
There are no other cars. I watch the country sweeping past, through the wide-open window from which the glass has long since gone. It occurs to me that the majority of humankind lives more or less like these men and women, like these dust-covered children—and not at all as I do. We are the exceptions, sequestered and well defended in our gardens of wealth and hygiene.
I leave with my own sense of serenity. Perhaps these are simply physical reactions to the day’s heat, traveling, dehydration, encounters, stress and general fatigue. Or perhaps I have actually learned something, one small additional thing, about the complexity of being human.
Ritual, in short, is the foundation of the elaborate human social and spiritual reality within which a large part of our lives develops.
But never has it been so clear that science cannot solve all problems. Our splendid intelligence surrenders to a small virus that is little more than a speck of dust. Science is the best tool we have found, let’s hold it dear; but we remain fragile when faced with a powerful and indifferent nature.
Humankind can survive only if we work together.
