Fundamental physics

Axion stations

Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition


A possible particle of dark matter





WHEN Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate, proposed the existence of a new type of elementary particle in 1977 he named it an “axion”, after a type of detergent, because it cleaned up a profound physical problem.

This problem is that the amount of visible stuff in the universe is far smaller than is needed to account for the apparent effects of gravity. In particular, galaxies behave as though they are much heavier than they actually look.

One way of solving this conundrum is to invoke a type of matter that has a gravitational field, but cannot interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation, and is therefore invisible. In other words, dark matter. Axions are the most popular proposal for what this dark matter might actually be.

Unfortunately, they have since created a mess of their own. Many experiments have looked for axions. Most have not found them. Indeed, they have proved so hard to detect that many physicists question whether they exist.

Earlier this year, though, an Italian experiment did see something that suggested their existence. Now a paper by Piyare Jain and Gurmukh Singh of the State University of New York, Buffalo, also offers some evidence that axions really do exist. It is published in the January edition of the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics.

The pair had another look at some photographic plates from an experiment conducted a decade ago at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Though that experiment had not been intended to make axions, the two researchers wondered if it had created such particles as a by-product. After re-analysing the plates, Dr Jain and Dr Singh concluded that they may have found axions that exist so fleetingly that they are not noticed by the modern electronic methods of particle detection that have replaced the use of photographic plates.

If their interpretation is correct, that would be exciting, as it would establish the existence of a new class of matter. Unfortunately, it would not solve the dark-matter problem, since what the two researchers think they have found would be too short-lived to form the “missing” matter. But other particles in the class might plug the gap. An experiment under way at DESY, a laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, is seeking to make and detect axions that would fall into this longer-lived category. Should it succeed, scientists will have come closer to cleaning up the mystery

Giant Swiss Collider
May Reveal Secrets
About Origins of Mass
January 5, 2007; Page B1
The life of a physicist is marked by "attacks of hopelessness, depression and discouragement," Nobel laureate Leon Lederman wrote in 1993. Since that was a lot closer to the golden era of particle physics than 2007 is, you can imagine the angst of those who toil in the field today. The last really cool and surprising discovery in particle physics -- which probes the most fundamental aspects of matter, space and time, and the forces that sculpt the cosmos -- came in 1974.

Help is on the way. This year, the Large Hadron Collider, a nearly $4 billion accelerator at the CERN physics lab near Geneva, will be switched on. When it is, it may produce new kinds of matter that nature has hidden from human eyes -- extra dimensions of space concealed within the mundane three, like a secret compartment in a suitcase, and a mysterious field that gives matter mass.

The collider will send protons, the positive-charged particles in atomic nuclei, racing around a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference at nearly the speed of light. One beam will travel clockwise and one counterclockwise until protons smash head-on, 800 million of them per second.

The impact will have an energy of 14 trillion electron volts. That's roughly the energy of motion of 14 flying mosquitoes, but the LHC will cram it into a space one-trillionth the size of a mosquito. The resulting fireball will rival one that last existed, physicists calculate, just after the big bang that created the universe.

Out of that energy may come miniature black holes and even evidence that quarks and electrons, previously believed to be fundamental, actually are made of smaller entities, says physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada.

The LHC's fireball could also act as a doorway into a looking-glass world. As Einstein showed, energy and mass are interconvertible (E = mc2). The energy produced by colliding protons can, therefore, crystallize into particles, like water vapor condensing into morning dew. It just so happens that 14 trillion eV is probably enough to play subatomic matchmaker. That is, it might create a partner for every known particle.

The superpartners (such as squarks for quarks) have never been seen. But many theorists believe they exist, with the same electric charge but (probably) greater masses than their partners. The discovery of a hidden particle zoo would be both humbling (what else is nature concealing?) and illuminating. One superpartner, for instance, might be the long-sought "dark matter" that lurks throughout the universe. Emitting no light, it shoves around stars and galaxies, and scientists have no idea what the heck it is.

If the LHC creates superpartners, the results will be spun as fiercely as a political-campaign debate. String theory, which asserts that the basic constituents of matter are tiny vibrating strings that exist in 11 or 12 dimensions, requires supersymmetry. Thus stringsters may hail signs of superpartners as their long-sought vindication. But rival theories posit superpartners, too, so if the LHC finds them it wouldn't uniquely support string theory.

"Supersymmetry is a vital part of string theory, so if the LHC doesn't find it, that would argue strongly against string theory," says physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "If it is observed, you can say that string theory has not been disproved, but not that it has been validated."

The LHC might prove string theory's boldest claim: the existence of hidden dimensions. If some energy goes missing after the protons collide, one explanation would be that the missing energy has fallen into a hidden dimension.

Perhaps the deepest puzzle of the physical world is the origin of mass. Physicists have measured the masses of electrons, protons and the like to many decimal places. What they don't know is why particles weigh anything -- why, in other words, matter has mass. After all, massless particles exist; photons (particles of light) have zero mass. Physicists -- worse than toddlers when it comes to asking "why?" -- aren't content with the answer that mass exists "just because."

The source of mass, theorists believe, is a ghostly field that pervades every nook and cranny of the universe, from the space between the stars of Orion to that in your kitchen cabinet. Particles moving through this "Higgs field" would be like fruit dragged through chocolate fondue: some would gather up more mass (think strawberries) and some would gather less (slippery cantaloupe). The former would become massive like neutrons, the latter light like electrons.

If the Higgs field exists, it would have a particle associated with it which the LHC may cough up. How momentous that would be is reflected in Dr. Lederman's name for it: "the God particle."

Any of these discoveries would lift physicists' depression. So would something unexpected, after three decades of the same-old same-old. "The current model has been frustratingly accurate," says Prof. Krauss. "It's always better to be surprised, and that's what we hope for from the LHC." But if neither Higgs particles nor superpartners show up, says Dr. Smolin, "it's back to square one, because everything we think we know will be wrong."

Nada como o jornalismo científico de má qualidade...

Falando sério, é por isso que tem tanto físico de partícula "olhando para o céu" hoje em dia: primeiro pq porque a maior parte (todas??) as grandes novidades na física de partículas das últimas 2 décadas se devem ao campo que se costuma chamar de astropartículas: usam-se observações Solares, a estrelares, galácticas, extra-galácticas e (para os de coração forte) cosmológicas para inferir propriedades das partículas fundamentais!

Indo do mais "real" pro mais "incerto", o fato de sabermos hoje que os neutrinos (pelo menos 2 deles) têm que ter massa graças a observações dos fluxos de neutrino do Sol (e alguns de reatores); o "entendimento" que tem que haver alguma forma de matéria que não conhecemos aglorerada nas galáxias e "clusters" (a chamada matéria escura); e mais curioso (o "bias" é meu...), que cerca de 70% da energia do universo está em uma forma que não temos nem idéia do que seja (embora conheçamos algumas de suas propriedades cada vez melhor) são todas descobertas que se devem à feliuz união de física de partículas & astrofísica/cosmologia.

Mas obviamente preferimos ver as coisas de modo mais "direto", e por isso seria bem legal se fossem de verdade descobertas algumas partículas novas (matéria escura??). Se não conseguirmos ver nada do que esperamos, também vai ser legal (mais??) pois saberemos que parte das coisas têm que ser refeitas, tendo como base os novos dados que vêm. Enfim, é esperar para ver. Começando a andar o bicho agora em 2007, creio que por 2008/2009 teremos os primeiros dados com significância estatística para poder dizer algo. Os físicos de partículas estão todos como doidos por esses resultados...

When Number Proofs
Are Done by Computer,
Mightn't Some Err?
January 12, 2007; Page B1
If I have $15 and you have $20, and we keep tossing a coin so that you win $1 from me if it turns up heads and I win $1 from you if it lands tails, you have a reasonable chance of eventually bankrupting me and walking away with the whole $35. But your prospects are not so overwhelmingly great that I refuse to play. In fact, your probability of winning it all equals your $20 divided by the sum of our stakes ($35), or just 57%.

The "gambler's ruin" problem has entranced mathematicians since the 1800s, and at this week's annual meetings of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America in New Orleans it played another role: "as a case study in the limits of proof and of machine proofs," says mathematician Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers University. Mathematicians, to their dismay, are the first scientists to face the shattering and humbling prospect that the complexities of nature may be beyond the reach of the human mind.

In the coin-toss game, with patience and a calculator, you can figure out not only each gambler's chance of cleaning up but also how long the game will likely take and the probability that it will eventually end. (That probability is 100%, no matter how unequal the initial stakes.) Other questions, however, "are beyond the scope of mere humans," says Prof. Zeilberger. How the game will play out if we use a loaded coin, for instance, requires a computer.

No one blinks an eye when computers do tedious calculations like this, especially when speed counts. Imagine having only an abacus, pencil and paper to calculate stock-market prices in real time.

For proofs rather than calculations, however, the growing reliance on a box of electronics to apprehend mathematical truth is freaking out some researchers. After all, Galileo said that God wrote the book of nature in the language of mathematics. "If the goal of mathematics is understanding," Brian Davies of Kings College London recently wrote in the journal Notices of the AMS, then "computer-assisted proofs do not supply it in full measure."

At the math meeting, discovery after discovery showed that there are still secrets to plumb even about plain old natural numbers -- 1, 2, 3 and the rest. Take the fact that there is an infinite number of prime numbers, those greater than 1 that can be divided only by themselves and 1. No matter how high you count, you never reach numbers so large they all have other factors. The primes go on forever.

Yet nonprime numbers are as nimble at avoiding the landmines of primes as the most adroit sapper. For instance, there are infinitely many nonprimes that can absorb any extra digit and still remain nonprime, Michael Filaseta of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and his student Mark Kozek announced at the math meeting. That is, you can start with something like 121 and insert a 7, making 1271, and it's still not prime. It's obvious that that would work for even numbers and those ending in 5, but it also works for those ending in 1, 3, 7 and 9.

That's surprising when you remember that there are infinitely many primes, lurking in every neighborhood of the number line. You'd think that eventually nature would run out of numbers that can absorb any extra digit and still avoid becoming prime.

But as the South Carolina team proved, there are infinitely many nonprime numbers that are odd and don't end in 5, yet can withstand this abuse. They even found the smallest one: 25,011. No matter which digit you pick, 0 to 9, and no matter where you want to put it -- between the 2 and 5, the 5 and 0, whatever -- you won't get a prime number.

Prof. filaseta and his student proved this without significant silicon help, which goes to show that humans can still discover and prove mathematical truths. But mathematicians have become increasingly vexed that some statements about numbers cannot be proved by humans. Worse, the proofs that computers do are so long and complicated that no one can say for sure that the statement being proved really is true, says Prof. Davies.

Two recent computer-aided proofs have this problem. One proved that to color any assembly of shapes, such as a map or a tiled floor, so that no adjoining shapes have the same color, you need only four colors. It's called the four-color theorem. Another proved that to pack the most spheres in a big box, arrange them like oranges in a crate with oranges in each upper layer resting on the dimple formed by four oranges beneath them. A third proof, only partially complete, will likely run to 10,000 pages if it is ever written down in full, says Prof. Davies, "and would not be comprehensible to any single individual."

No one has been able to check every line of these three proofs, as your 7th grade geometry teacher did. And the fact that a computer did them robs mathematicians of the joy of understanding how the necessary insight came about; the silicon ain't talking. There will be more and more proofs that no human mind will be able to follow. As mathematicians try to understand the language of Galileo's God, they may never be sure they have read it right.

• Email me at sciencejournal@wsj.com.

Ciência não exclui Deus

O biólogo que desvendou o genoma humano
explica por que é possível aceitar as teorias de
Darwin e ao mesmo tempo manter a fé religiosa


Gabriela Carelli

O biólogo americano Francis Collins é um dos cientistas mais notáveis da atualidade. Diretor do Projeto Genoma, bancado pelo governo americano, foi um dos responsáveis por um feito espetacular da ciência moderna: o mapeamento do DNA humano, em 2001. Desde então, tornou-se o cientista que mais rastreou genes com vistas ao tratamento de doenças em todo o mundo. Collins também é conhecido por pertencer a uma estirpe rara, a dos cientistas cujo compromisso com a investigação do mundo natural não impede a profissão da fé religiosa. Alvo de críticas de seus colegas, cuja maioria nega a existência de Deus, Collins decidiu reagir. Ele lançou há pouco nos Estados Unidos o livro The Language of God (A Linguagem de Deus). Nas 300 páginas da obra, o biólogo conta como deixou de ser ateu para se tornar cristão aos 27 anos e narra as dificuldades que enfrentou no meio acadêmico ao revelar sua fé. "As sociedades precisam tanto da ciência como da religião. Elas não são incompatíveis, mas complementares", explica o cientista. A seguir, a entrevista de Collins a VEJA:

Veja – No livro A Linguagem de Deus, o senhor conta que era um "ateu insolente" e, depois, se converteu ao cristianismo. O que o fez mudar suas convicções?
Francis Collins – Houve um período em minha vida em que era conveniente não acreditar em Deus. Eu era jovem, e a física, a química e a matemática pareciam ter todas as respostas para os mistérios da vida. Reduzir tudo a equações era uma forma de exercer total controle sobre meu mundo. Percebi que a ciência não substitui a religião quando ingressei na faculdade de medicina. Vi pessoas sofrendo de males terríveis. Uma delas, depois de me contar sobre sua fé e como conseguia forças para lutar contra a doença, perguntou-me em que eu acreditava. Disse a ela que não acreditava em nada. Pareceu-me uma resposta vaga, uma frase feita de um cientista ingênuo que se achava capaz de tirar conclusões sobre um assunto tão profundo e negar a evidência de que existe algo maior do que equações. Eu tinha 27 anos. Não passava de um rapaz insolente. Estava negando a possibilidade de haver algo capaz de explicar questões para as quais nunca encontramos respostas, mas que movem o mundo e fazem as pessoas superar desafios.

Veja – Que questões são essas para as quais não encontramos respostas?
Collins – Falo de questões filosóficas que transcendem a ciência, que fazem parte da existência humana. Os cientistas que se dizem ateus têm uma visão empobrecida sobre perguntas que todos nós, seres humanos, nos fazemos todos os dias. "O que acontece depois da morte?" ou "Qual é o motivo de eu estar aqui?". Não é certo negar aos seres humanos o direito de acreditar que a vida não é um simples episódio da natureza, explicado cientificamente e sem um sentido maior. Esse lado filosófico da fé, na minha opinião, é uma das facetas mais importantes da religião. A busca por Deus sempre esteve presente na história e foi necessária para o progresso. Civilizações que tentaram suprimir a fé e justificar a vida exclusivamente por meio da ciência – como, recentemente, a União Soviética de Stalin e a China de Mao – falharam. Precisamos da ciência para entender o mundo e usar esse conhecimento para melhorar as condições humanas. Mas a ciência deve permanecer em silêncio nos assuntos espirituais.

Veja – A maioria dos cientistas argumenta que a crença em Deus é irracional e incompatível com as descobertas científicas. O zoólogo Richard Dawkins, com quem o senhor trava um embate filosófico sobre o tema, diz que a religião é a válvula de escape do homem, o vírus da mente. Como o senhor responde a isso?
Collins – Essa perspectiva de Dawkins é cheia de presunção. Eu acredito que o ateísmo é a mais irracional das escolhas. Os cientistas ateus, que acreditam apenas na teoria da evolução e negam todo o resto, sofrem de excesso de confiança. Na visão desses cientistas, hoje adquirimos tanta sabedoria a respeito da evolução e de como a vida se formou que simplesmente não precisamos mais de Deus. O que deve ficar claro é que as sociedades necessitam tanto da religião como da ciência. Elas não são incompatíveis, mas sim complementares. A ciência investiga o mundo natural. Deus pertence a outra esfera. Deus está fora do mundo natural. Usar as ferramentas da ciência para discutir religião é uma atitude imprópria e equivocada. No ano passado foram lançados vários livros de cientistas renomados, como Dawkins, Daniel Dennett e Sam Harris, que atacam a religião sem nenhum propósito. É uma ofensa àqueles que têm fé e respeitam a ciência. Em vez de blasfemarem, esses cientistas deveriam trabalhar para elucidar os mistérios que ainda existem. É o que nos cabe.

Veja – O senhor afirma que as sociedades precisam da religião, mas como justificar as barbaridades cometidas em nome de Deus através da história?
Collins – Apesar de tudo o que já aconteceu, coisas maravilhosas foram feitas em nome da religião. Pense em Madre Teresa de Calcutá ou em William Wilberforce, o cristão inglês que passou a vida lutando contra a escravatura. O problema é que a água pura da fé religiosa circula nas veias defeituosas e enferrujadas dos seres humanos, o que às vezes a torna turva. Isso não significa que os princípios estejam errados, apenas que determinadas pessoas usam esses princípios de forma inadequada para justificar suas ações. A religião é um veículo da fé – essa, sim, imprescindível para a humanidade.

Veja – O senhor diz que a ciência e a religião convergem, mas devem ser tratadas separadamente. Como vê o movimento do "design inteligente", em que cientistas usam a religião para explicar fatos da natureza que permanecem um mistério para a ciência?
Collins – Essa abordagem é um grande erro. Os cientistas não podem cair na armadilha a que chamo de "lacuna divina". Lamento que o movimento do design inteligente tenha caído nessa cilada ao usar o argumento de que a evolução não explica estruturas tão complicadas como as células ou o olho humano. É dever de todos os cientistas, inclusive dos que têm fé, tentar encontrar explicações racionais para tudo o que existe. Todos os sistemas complexos citados pelo design inteligente – o mais citado é o "bacterial flagellum", um pequeno motor externo que permite à bactéria se mover nos líquidos – são um conjunto de trinta proteínas. Podemos juntar artificialmente essas trinta proteínas, que nada vai acontecer. Isso porque esses mecanismos se formaram gradualmente através do recrutamento de outros componentes. No curso de longos períodos de tempo, as máquinas moleculares se desenvolveram por meio do processo que Darwin vislumbrou, ou seja, a evolução.

Veja – Qual a sua leitura da Bíblia?
Collins – Santo Agostinho, no ano 400, alertou para o perigo de se achar que a interpretação que cada um de nós dá à Bíblia é a única correta, mas a advertência foi logo esquecida. Agostinho já dizia que não há como saber exatamente o que significam os seis dias da criação. Um exemplo de que uma interpretação unilateral da Bíblia é equivocada é que há duas histórias sobre a criação no livro do Gênesis 1 e 2 – e elas são discordantes. Isso deixa claro que esses textos não foram concebidos como um livro científico, mas para nos ensinar sobre a natureza divina e nossa relação com Ele. Muitas pessoas que crêem em Deus foram levadas a acreditar que, se não levarmos ao pé da letra todas as passagens da Bíblia, perderemos nossa fé e deixaremos de acreditar que Cristo morreu e ressuscitou. Mas ninguém pode afirmar que a Terra tem menos de 10 000 anos a não ser que se rejeitem todas as descobertas fundamentais da geologia, da cosmologia, da física, da química e da biologia.

Veja – O senhor acredita na Ressurreição?
Collins – Sim. Também acredito na Virgem Maria e em milagres.

Veja – Não é uma contradição que um cientista acredite em dogmas e milagres?
Collins – A questão dos milagres está relacionada à forma como se acredita em Deus. Se uma pessoa crê e reconhece que Ele estabeleceu as leis da natureza e está pelo menos em parte fora dessa natureza, então é totalmente aceitável que esse Deus seja capaz de intervir no mundo natural. Isso pode aparecer como um milagre, que seria uma suspensão temporária ou um adiamento das leis que Deus criou. Eu não acredito que Deus faça isso com freqüência – nunca testemunhei algo que possa classificar como um milagre. Se Deus quis mandar uma mensagem para este mundo na figura de seu filho, por meio da Ressurreição e da Virgem Maria, e a isso chamam milagre, não vejo motivo para colocar esses dogmas como um desafio para a ciência. Quem é cristão acredita nesses dogmas – ou então não é cristão. Faz parte do jogo.

Veja – É possível acreditar nas teorias de Darwin e em Deus ao mesmo tempo?
Collins – Com certeza. Se no começo dos tempos Deus escolheu usar o mecanismo da evolução para criar a diversidade de vida que existe no planeta, para produzir criaturas que à sua imagem tenham livre-arbítrio, alma e capacidade de discernir entre o bem e o mal, quem somos nós para dizer que ele não deveria ter criado o mundo dessa forma?

Veja – Alguns cientistas afirmam que a religião e certas características ligadas à crença em Deus, como o altruísmo, são ferramentas inerentes ao ser humano para garantir a evolução e a sobrevivência. O senhor concorda?
Collins – Esses argumentos podem parecer plausíveis, mas não há provas de que o altruísmo seja uma característica do ser humano que permite sua sobrevivência e seu progresso, como sugerem os evolucionistas. Eles querem justificar tudo por meio da ciência, e isso acaba sendo usado para difundir o ateísmo.

Veja – Mas o altruísmo é visto hoje pela genética do comportamento como uma característica herdada pelos genes, assim como a inteligência. O senhor, como geneticista, discorda da genética comportamental?
Collins – Há muitas teorias interessantes nessa área, mas são insuficientes para explicar os nobres atos altruístas que admiramos. O recado da evolução para cada um de nós é propagar o nosso DNA e tudo o que está contido nele. É a nossa missão no planeta. Mas não é assim, de forma tão lógica, que entendo o mundo, muito menos o altruísmo e a religiosidade. Penso em Oskar Schindler, que se sacrificou por um longo período para salvar judeus, e não pessoas de sua própria fé. Por que coisas desse tipo acontecem? Se estou caminhando à beira de um rio, vejo uma pessoa se afogar e decido ajudá-la mesmo pondo em risco a minha vida, de onde vem esse impulso? Nada na teoria da evolução pode explicar a noção de certo e errado, a moral, que parece ser exclusiva da espécie humana.

Veja – Muitas religiões são contrárias ao uso de técnicas científicas que poderiam salvar vidas, como a do uso de células-tronco. Como o senhor se posiciona nessa polêmica?
Collins – Temos de ser sensíveis e respeitar as diferentes religiões no que diz respeito aos avanços científicos. Mas interromper as pesquisas científicas ou impedir que uma pessoa com uma doença terrível tenha uma vida melhor só porque a religião não aceita determinado tratamento é antiético. Por outro lado, existem fronteiras que a ciência não deve transpor, como a clonagem humana, que além de tudo não serviria para nada a não ser para nos repugnar. Cada caso tem de ser avaliado isoladamente.

Veja – Os geneticistas são muitas vezes acusados de brincar de Deus. Como o senhor encara essas críticas?
Collins – Se todos brincássemos de Deus como Deus gostaria, com esperança e amor, ninguém se abateria muito com comentários do gênero. Mas somos seres humanos e temos propensão ao egoísmo e aos julgamentos equivocados. O importante é não reagir de forma exagerada à perspectiva de que as pessoas possam vir a fazer mau uso das descobertas da genética, mas sim focar o lado bom dessa "brincadeira". A maior parte das pesquisas genéticas busca a cura de doenças como câncer, problemas cardíacos, esquizofrenia. São objetivos louváveis. Para evitar o uso impróprio da ciência, o Projeto Genoma Humano apóia um programa que visa a preservar a ética nas pesquisas genéticas e certificar-se de que todas as nossas descobertas beneficiarão as pessoas e a sociedade.

Veja – O que esperar das pesquisas genéticas no futuro?
Collins – Nos próximos dois ou três anos vamos descobrir os fatores genéticos que criam a propensão ao câncer, ao diabetes e às doenças cardiovasculares. Isso possibilitará que as pessoas saibam que provavelmente vão desenvolver esses males e tomem medidas preventivas contra eles, com a ajuda do médico. Mais à frente, as descobertas das relações entre o genoma e as doenças farão com que os tratamentos e os remédios sejam personalizados, tornando-os mais eficientes e com menos efeitos colaterais.

Veja – O senhor acredita que Deus ouve suas preces e as atende?
Collins – Eu nunca ouvi Deus falar. Algumas pessoas ouviram. Não acredito que rezar seja um caminho para manipular as intenções de Deus. Rezar é uma forma de entrarmos em contato com Ele. Nesse processo, aprendemos coisas sobre nós mesmos e sobre nossas motivações.

Gravity

Weighing the universe

Jan 25th 2007
From The Economist print edition


How scientists are trying to find where Einstein went wrong

Stephen Jeffrey






FAMILIAR as it may seem, gravity remains a mystery to modern physics. Despite several decades of trying, scientists have failed to fit Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity holds big objects together, with the quantum mechanics he pioneered, which describes the tiny fundamental particles of which matter consists and the forces by which they interact. Recent discoveries have highlighted further problems.

Many physicists are therefore entertaining the idea that Einstein's ideas about gravity must be wrong or at least incomplete. Showing exactly how and where the great man erred is the task of the scientists who gathered at the “Rethinking Gravity” conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson this week.

One way to test general relativity is to examine ever more closely the assumptions on which it rests, such as the equivalence principle: that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition. This principle was famously demonstrated by Galileo Galilei some 400 years ago when he simultaneously dropped cannon and musket balls, and balls made of gold, silver and wood, from the Tower of Pisa. Each appeared to hit the ground at the same time.

A more precise test requires a taller tower. In effect, researchers are sending balls all the way to the moon and back. Tom Murphy, of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues fire laser beams from the deserts of New Mexico at reflectors placed on the moon by American and Russian spacecraft in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They use a telescope to capture the small fraction of the light that returns. Because the speed of light is known, they can calculate the distance between the Earth and the moon from the time taken for light to traverse it.



Great minds think alike
According to general relativity, because the Earth and the moon orbit the sun, they should “fall” towards it at the same rate, in the same way as Galileo's balls fell to the ground. By repeatedly measuring the distance between them, scientists can calculate the orbits of the Earth and the moon around the sun relative to each other.

If the equivalence principle were violated, the moon's orbit around the Earth would appear skewed, either towards or away from the sun. So far, Dr Murphy told the conference, these experiments have merely confirmed the equivalence principle to one part in 10 trillion. Dr Murphy and his colleagues hope that even more precise measurements could ultimately show general relativity to be only approximately correct. This would usher in a new revolution in physics.

Another aspect of Einstein's work to be tested is the existence of gravitational waves. General relativity views gravity not as a force but as a consequence of the curved geometry of space and time. Space-time, as it is known, has four dimensions: the three familiar spatial ones of length, breadth and height, and time. It can be distorted or curved by massive objects, such as stars. Temporary ripples in space-time—gravitational waves—are caused when such objects accelerate. They are weak, but if the accelerating object has enough mass it should be possible to spot them.

Scientists at several new ground-based observatories are hoping to do just that. The most sensitive of these, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, is based on two sites in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. So far, it has seen nothing worthy of mention—but it has been running at both sites for less than a year. Even so, the American space agency, NASA, and the European Space Agency are collaborating on plans for the next step: the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which would be far more sensitive to gravitational waves. If they were detected, another of Einstein's predictions could be confirmed.

Further experiments are testing gravity in space. NASA has a spacecraft called Gravity Probe B that is examining a subtlety known as the Lense-Thirring effect that produces a small force as space-time is twisted by a spinning mass, such as a rotating planet. The probe orbits the Earth's poles; the Lense-Thirring effect is predicted to shift, little by little, the point on the equator crossed by the spacecraft. This may take several months to become noticeable; the results are due in the spring.

What is happening to space-time around a rotating object that is much more massive than the Earth—a black hole, say—should be more obvious. Some elegant and profound mathematics says that black holes can be described using just two numbers: their mass and their spin. Now astronomers want to know whether the maths is correct. Avery Broderick, of Harvard University, told the conference that studies of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy could be detailed enough to decide this. He thinks it may be possible to measure the spin using an intercontinental network of existing radio telescopes over the next five years.

Data from existing X-ray satellites that show images of gas whizzing about black holes at close to the speed of light hint that time slows as the gas plunges into the zone from which escape is impossible. NASA has proposed a mission, called Constellation-X, that would build on this work by providing detailed pictures of what happens to space-time at the edges of these gravitational chasms.

Then there are plans to examine the gravitational wave background, which would show what the universe looked like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The earliest images that cosmologists have found come from a couple of hundred thousand years after the birth of the universe. The pictures show that it was already lumpy; the denser areas went on to become galaxies, stars and planets. Knowing how this came about by looking even further back would allow cosmologists to decide which of their theories of the early universe were correct. This, in turn, would tell them more about the nature of gravity. Will Kinney, of Buffalo University, told the conference of future plans to detect the extremely faint gravitational waves still ringing in the heavens from the Big Bang.

More than 100 years after Einstein began the most recent revolution in physics, his ideas remain mostly correct. But physicists are convinced they are incomplete, and are determined to discover precisely where they fail.

Essa é para o Mends me explicar: um Marxista defendendo a religião???


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

Sou mais o mano que sabe o que fala :-)

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25349-2552017,00.html

A deadly certitude
Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg
Richard Dawkins
The god delusion
416pp. Bantam. £20.
0 593 05548 9
US: Houghton Mifflin. $27. 0618680004

Of all the scientific discoveries that have disturbed the religious mind, none has had the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. No advance of physics or even cosmology has produced such a shock. In the early days of Christianity, the Church Fathers Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria rejected the knowledge, common since the time of Plato, that the Earth is a sphere. They insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, and from Genesis to Revelation verses could be interpreted to mean that the Earth is flat. But the evidence for a spherical Earth was overwhelming to anyone who had seen a ship’s hull disappear below the horizon while its masts were still visible, and in the end the flat Earth did not seem worth a fight. By the high Middle Ages, the spherical Earth was accepted by educated Christians. Dante, for example, found the core of the spherical Earth a convenient destination for sinners. What was once a serious issue has become a joke. A friend at the University of Kansas has formed a Flat Earth Society to demand – in mockery of the demand by Kansas creationists that schools present “Intelligent Design” as an “alternative” to evolution – that Kansas public schools teach flat-Earth theory as an “alternative” to spherical-Earth theory.

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The more radical idea that the Earth moves around the Sun was harder to accept. After all, the Bible puts mankind at the centre of a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation, so how could our Earth not be at the centre of the universe? Until the nineteenth century, Copernican astronomy could not be taught at Salamanca or other Spanish universities, but by Darwin’s time it troubled hardly anyone. Even as early as the time of Galileo, Cardinal Baronius, the Vatican librarian, famously quipped that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

A different challenge to religion emerged with Newton. His theories of motion and gravitation showed how natural phenomena could be explained without divine intervention, and were opposed on religious grounds at Newton’s own university by John Hutchinson. But opposition to Newtonianism in Europe collapsed before the close of the eighteenth century. Believers could comfort themselves with the thought that miracles were simply occasional exceptions to Newton’s laws, and anyway mathematical physics was unlikely to disturb those who did not understand its explanatory power.

Darwinism was different. It was not just that the theory of evolution, like the theory of a spherical moving Earth, is in conflict with biblical literalism; it was not just that evolution, like the Copernican theory, denied a central status to humans; and it was not just that evolution, like Newton’s theory, provided a non-religious explanation for natural phenomena that had seemed inexplicable without divine intervention. Much worse, among the natural phenomena explained by natural selection were the very features of humanity of which we are most proud. It became plausible that our love for our mates and children, and, according to the work of modern evolutionary biologists, even more abstract moral principles, such as loyalty, charity and honesty, have an origin in evolution, rather than in a divinely created soul.

Given the battering that traditional religion has taken from the theory of evolution, it is fitting that the most energetic, eloquent and uncompromising modern adversaries of religion are biologists who helped us to understand evolution: first Francis Crick, and now Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, Dawkins caps a series of his books on biology and religion with a swingeing attack on every aspect of religion – not just traditional religion, but also the vaguer modern assortment of pieties that often appropriates its name. In the unkindest cut of all, Dawkins even argues that the persistence of belief in God is itself an outcome of natural selection – acting perhaps on our genes, as argued by Dean Hamer in The God Gene, but more certainly on our “memes”, the bundles of cultural beliefs and attitudes that in a Darwinian though non-biological way tend to be passed on from generation to generation. It is not that the meme helps the believer or the believer’s genes to survive; it is the meme itself that by its nature tends to survive.

For instance, the persistence of belief in a particular religion is naturally aided if that religion teaches that God punishes disbelief. Such a religion tends to survive if the threatened punishment is sufficiently awful. In contrast, a religion would have trouble keeping converts in line if it taught that infidels are subject after death to only a brief spell of mild discomfort, after which they join the faithful in eternal bliss. So it is natural that in traditional Christianity and Islam, disbelief became the ultimate crime, and Hell the ultimate torture chamber. No wonder the mathematician Paul Erdos always referred to God as the Supreme Fascist. Dawkins’s book focuses on Christianity and Islam, which traditionally emphasize the importance of belief, rather than on religions like Judaism, Hinduism or Shinto, which are tied to specific ethnic groups, and tend to stress observance more than faith.

Dawkins, like Erdos, dislikes God. He calls the God of the Old Testament “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. As for the New Testament, he quotes with approval the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, that “The Christian God is a being of a terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust”. This is strong stuff, and Dawkins obviously intends to shock the reader, but his invective has a constructive purpose. By attacking the God of sacred Scripture, he is trying to weaken the authority of that God’s commands – commands whose interpretation has led humanity to a shameful history of inquisitions, crusades and jihads. Dawkins treats the reader to many brutal details, but we only have to look at today’s headlines to supply our own. For some reason, Dawkins does not comment on the God of the Koran, who would seem to provide equal opportunities for invective.

The reviews of The God Delusion in the New York Times and the New Republic took Dawkins to task for his contemptuous rejection of the classic “proofs” of the existence of God. I agree with Dawkins in his rejection of these proofs, but I would have answered them a little differently. The “ontological proof” of St Anselm asks us first to agree that it is possible to conceive of something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Once that agreement is obtained, the sly philosopher points out that the thing conceived of must exist, since if it did not then something just like it that actually exists would thereby be greater. And what could this greatest actually existing thing be, but God? QED. From the monk Gaunilo in Anselm’s time to philosophers in our own such as J. L. Mackie and Alvin Plantinga, there is general agreement that Anselm’s proof is flawed, though they disagree about what the flaw is. My own view is that the proof is circular: it is not true that one can conceive of something than which nothing greater can be conceived unless one first assumes the existence of God. Anselm’s “proof” has reappeared and been refuted in many different forms, it is a little like an infectious disease that can be defeated by an antibiotic, but which then evolves so that it needs to be defeated all over again.

The “cosmological proof” is no better logically, but it does have a certain appeal to the physicist. In essence, it argues that everything has a cause, and since this chain of causality cannot go on forever, it must terminate in a first cause, which we call God. The idea of an ultimate cause is deeply attractive, and indeed the dream of elementary particle physics is to find the final theory at the root of all chains of explanation of what we see in nature. The trouble is that such a mathematical final theory would hardly be what anyone means by God. Who prays to quantum mechanics? The believer may justly argue that no theory of physics can be a first cause, since we would still wonder why nature is governed by that theory, rather than some other. Yet, in just the same sense, God cannot be a first cause either, for whatever our conception of God we could still wonder why the world is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other.


The “proof” that has historically been most persuasive is the argument from design. The world in general (and life in particular) is supposed to be so marvellously shaped that it could only have been the handiwork of the supreme Designer. The great achievement of scientists from Newton to Crick and Dawkins has been to refute this argument by explaining the world.

I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk? It is like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Eagleton’s judgement is particularly inappropriate; it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope.


Where I think Dawkins goes wrong is that, like Henry V after Agincourt, he does not seem to realize the extent to which his side has won. Setting aside the rise of Islam in Europe, the decline of serious Christian belief among Europeans is so widely advertised that Dawkins turns to the United States for most of his examples of unregenerate religious belief. He attributes the greater regard for religion in the US to the fact that Americans have never had an established Church, an idea he may have picked up from Tocqueville. But although most Americans may be sure of the value of religion, as far as I can tell they are not very certain about the truth of what their own religion teaches. According to a recent article in the New York Times, American evangelists are in despair over a poll that showed that only 4 per cent of American teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. The spread of religious toleration provides evidence of the weakening of religious certitude. Most Christian groups have historically taught that there is no salvation without faith in Christ. If you are really sure that anyone without such faith is doomed to an eternity of Hell, then propagating that faith and suppressing disbelief would logically be the most important thing in the world – far more important than any merely secular virtues like religious toleration. Yet religious toleration is rampant in America. No one who publicly expressed disrespect for any particular religion could be elected to a major office.

Even though American atheists might have trouble winning elections, Americans are fairly tolerant of us unbelievers. My many good friends in Texas who are professed Christians do not even try to convert me. This might be taken as evidence that they don’t really mind if I spend eternity in Hell, but I prefer to think (and Baptists and Presbyterians have admitted it to me) that they are not all that certain about Hell and Heaven. I have often heard the remark (once from an American priest) that it is not so important what one believes; the important thing is how we treat each other. Of course, I applaud this sentiment, but imagine trying to explain “not important what one believes” to Luther or Calvin or St Paul. Remarks like this show a massive retreat of Christianity from the ground it once occupied, a retreat that can be attributed to no new revelation, but only to a loss of certitude.

Much of the weakening of religious certitude in the Christian West can be laid at the door of science; even people whose religion might incline them to hostility to the pretensions of science generally understand that they have to rely on science rather than religion to get things done. But this has not happened to anything like the same extent in the world of Islam. One finds in Islamic countries not only religious opposition to specific scientific theories, as occasionally in the West, but a widespread religious hostility to science itself. My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

The consequences are hideous. Whatever one thinks of the Muslims who blow themselves up in crowded cities in Europe or Israel or fly planes into buildings in the US, who could dispute that the certainty of their faith had something to do with it? George W. Bush and many others would have us believe that terrorism is a distortion of Islam, and that Islam is a religion of peace. Of course, it is good policy to say this, but statements about what “Islam is” make little sense. Islam, like all other religions, was created by people, and there are potentially as many different versions of Islam as there are people who profess to be Muslims. (The same remarks apply to Eagleton’s highly personal account of what Christianity “is”.) I don’t know on what ground one can say that a peaceable well-intentioned person like Abdus Salam was any more a true Muslim than the murderous holy warriors of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, the clerics throughout the world of Islam who incite hatred and violence, and those Muslims who demonstrate against supposed insults to their faith, but not against the atrocities committed in its name. (Incidentally, Abdus Salam regarded himself as a devout Muslim, but he belonged to a sect that most Muslims consider heretical, and for years was not allowed to return to Pakistan.) Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world, and in the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steven Weinberg is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas. He is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics and the US National Medal of Science, and is a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. His books include The First Three Minutes, 1977, Dreams of a Final Theory, 1992, and Facing Up, 2001.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology

Concordo. Acabei de ler God Dellusion, e é a obra mais preconceituosa e arrogante que já li na minha vida. Fiquei estupefato, uma vez que era fã de Dawkins. A sua visão de religião é rasa, dessas de revistinha de fofoca. Não condiz em nada com o título de pensador ou cientista. Aliás, dá pra ver que deve ter se esquecido até dos pré-socráticos, como Empédocles, o criador das "perguntas científicas", Parmênides, Tales de Mileto: "mesmo o que parece eterno deve ter tido um começo. Se teve um começo, houve ao menos uma transformação. Se houve uma transformação, houve uma força transformadora."

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly.

E isso é ridículo: repito que grandes pensadores, muito maiores que Dawkins, foram religiosos: São Tomás Aquinas, Agostinho, Maimônides. Maimônides, inclusive, foi um dos maiores aplicadores do método socrático de questionamento, inclusive do próprio judaísmo e do papel do judeu. É de Maimônides a parábola do judeu que encontra o Messias mendigando às portas de Roma e pergunta porque ele, Messias, não curou o mundo, ao que o Messias respondeu: "estou esperando você começar".

Dawkins não gosta de mitologia, e confunde mitologia com religião. E esse debate está resolvido há 2500 anos.

Acabei de ler God Dellusion

Não posso opinar, ainda não li: está na mesa de cabeceira, na fila esperando sua vez.

Mas vc não respondeu a minha pergunta:

Essa é para o Mends me explicar: um Marxista defendendo a religião???

Aliás, só para continuar na linha...

Thank You, Richard Dawkins
Sean at 2:46 am, February 14th, 2007

A few years ago, as a newbie assistant professor, I was visited in my office by an editor at The Free Press. He was basically trolling the corridors, looking for people who had interesting ideas for popular-science books. I said that I liked the idea of writing a book, but I didn’t really want to do a straight-up cosmology tome. I had a better idea: I could write a book explaining how, when you really think about things scientifically, you come to realize that God doesn’t exist. I even had a spiffy title picked out — God Remains Dead: Reason, Religion, and the Pointless Universe. It’s not any old book that manages to reference both Steven Weinberg and Friedrich Nietzsche right there on the cover. Box office, baby.

The editor was actually intrigued by the idea, and he took it back to his bosses. Ultimately, however, they decided not to offer me a contract, and I went on to write another book with more equations. (Now on sale at Amazon!)

All of which is to say: I totally could have been in on the ground floor of all this atheism chic. These days, between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a prominent publicly-outspoken atheist of one form or another. That could have been me, I tell you.

These guys have gotten a lot of attention — especially Dawkins, who was recently voted Person of the Year by at least one reputable organization. Of course, some of the attention has been negative, especially from folks who are unsympathetic to the notion of a harsh, materialistic, godless universe. But even among self-professed atheists and agnostics (not to mention your wishy-washy liberal religionists), some discomfort has been expressed over the tone of Dawkins’s approach. People have been known to call him arrogant. Even if you don’t believe in God, so the argument goes, it can be a bad strategy to be upfront and in-your-face in public about one’s atheism. People are very committed to their religious beliefs, and telling them that science proves them wrong will lead them away from science, not way from God. And if you must be a die-hard materialist, at least be polite about it and respect others’ beliefs — to be obnoxious and insulting is simply counterproductive. Apart from any deep issues of what we actually should believe, this is a separate matter of how we could best persuade others to agree with us.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that atheists shouldn’t be obnoxious and insulting; in fact, I think it’s a good strategy in all sorts of situations. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, etc. But it does not follow that we should keep quiet about comforting illusions because those are the only things standing between the poor dears and overwhelming existential anxiety. If people ask whether, as scientists, we believe in God, we should respect them enough to tell the truth — whatever we think that is. That doesn’t mean we have to go door-to-door spreading the good word of the laws of nature. It just means that we should be honest about what we actually think, giving the best arguments we have for whatever that may be, and let people decide for themselves what to believe.

Arrogant or not, as a matter of fact Dawkins and company have done a great service to the cause of atheism: they have significantly shifted the Overton Window. That’s the notion, borrowed from public-policy debates, of the spectrum of “acceptable opinion” on an issue. At any given time, on any particular question, the public discourse will implicitly deem certain positions to be respectable and worthy of civilized debate, and other positions to be crazy and laughable. The crucial part of this idea is that the window can be shifted by vigorous advocacy of positions on one extreme. And that’s just what Dawkins has done.

Newsweek: Science Finds God In other words, by being arrogant and uncompromising in his atheism, Dawkins has done a tremendous amount to make the very concept of atheism a respectable part of the public debate, even if you find him personally obnoxious. Evidence: a few years ago, major newsmagazines (prompted in part by the efforts of the Templeton Foundation) were running cover stories with titles like Science Finds God (Newsweek, July 20, 1998). Pure moonshine, of course — come down where you will on the whole God debate, it remains pretty clear that science hasn’t found Him. But, within the range of acceptable public discourse, both science and God were considered to be undeniably good things — it wasn’t a stretch to put them together. Time: God vs. Science? Nowadays, in contrast, we find cover stories with titles like God vs. Science (Time, Nov 13, 2006). You never would have seen such a story just a few years ago.

This is a huge step forward. Keep in mind, the typical American thinks of atheists as fundamentally untrustworthy people. A major network like CNN will think nothing of hosting a roundtable discussion on atheism and not asking any atheists to participate. But, unlike a short while ago, they will eventually be shamed into admitting that was a mistake, and make up for it by inviting some atheists to defend their ideas. Baby steps. Professional news anchors may still seem a little befuddled at the notion that a clean, articulate person may not believe in God. But at least that notion is getting a decent public hearing. Once people actually hear what atheists have to say, perhaps they will get the idea that one need not be an amoral baby-killer just because one doesn’t believe in God.

For that, Richard Dawkins, thank you.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/02/14/thank-you-richard-dawkins/

Contrapondo...

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_13.html#gleiser

MARCELO GLEISER
Physicist, Dartmouth College; Author, The Prophet and the Astronomer

That the Debate or, Should I Say, War, Between Science and Religion Will See New Light

I'm optimistic that the debate or, should I say, war, between science and religion will see new light. Right now, the fracturing seems to be worsening, as further entrenchment occurs on both sides. Books from Edge colleagues trashing religion as collective hallucination or delusion, or, better still, as idiotic superstition, carry a simple message to people outside the sciences: we are as radical as the religious extremists, as inflexible and intolerant as the movements we seek to exterminate by our oh-so-crystal-clear-and-irresistibly-compelling rationalizations.

Although I'm also an atheist, I do not forget what is behind the power of religious thought. Quite simply: hope. Life is though, people suffer, and, rightly or wrongly, religion offers something for people to hold on to. Yes, it's wild to believe in supernatural influences in the world, yes it's crazy to devote your life to a God that seems to have vanished from the world for, under conservative estimates, "at least" 2000 years. But scientists cannot forget that most people need some sort of spiritual guidance, a kind of guidance science, at least as is taught today, cannot offer. Science has shown, and keeps showing, that we live in a cold, hard universe, completely indifferent to us and to life. And yet, people love, die, connect, fight, and must come to some sort of inner peace, of acceptance. What can science offer these people?

It is futile and naive to simply dismiss the real need people have for spirituality.

My hope is that people will begin to see science as a vehicle for mutual understanding and for respecting life. The more we study life and its mechanisms, the more we realize how rare it is, how precious it is. Sure, there may be life elsewhere, and it may even be intelligent. However, even if this is the case, odds are we are still going to be stuck with ourselves, in this planet or our solar neighborhood, for quite some time. Either we learn that science teaches us humility and respect for life and the environment, or we exterminate this most precious cosmic jewel. I am optimistic that scientists will teach people these lessons, instead of simply try to rob them of their faith and offering nothing in return.

continuando....

. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

Deus é a única pergunta pra questão número um da Filosofia: de onde viemos?

Mesmo um Universo que sempre existiu surgiu em algum ponto. O que criou o Universo? Na falta de outra coisa, Deus. O que criou Deus? Porque, se Deus existe, ele deve ter sido criado também.

God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves.

Tomás de Aquino foi muito mais pensador que Dawkins...será "inveja", que um "inferior" que acreditou em Deus foi uma mente muito mais poderosa que a dele?

De novo, Dawkins confunde religião com mitologia. E qualquer criança que tenha lido O MUNDO DE SOFIA não confunde religião com mitologia. Pena que um dos mais incensados cientistas do mundo tenha se provado tão raso.

Marxistas acreditando em Deus? Por que não? Marx era ateu porque o mecanicismo de sua análise não tinha lugar pra Deus. O REGIME SOCIALISTA É ATEU PORQUE A VERDADEIRA ESPIRITUALIDADE, COMO A VERDADEIRA RACIONALIDADE, LEVA À LIBERDADE. Religião não é um conjunto de crenças mitológicas. É "religar" o ser com sua possibilidade de ser livre. Todo regime que almeja à servidão completa deve destruir a religião. É só ler 1984, mais um livro que Dawkins deve ter rejeitado. Mas um marxista que acredita em Deus acredita que há um jeito de fazer das pessoas escravas sem violentar suas liberdades.

Books from Edge colleagues trashing religion as collective hallucination or delusion, or, better still, as idiotic superstition, carry a simple message to people outside the sciences: we are as radical as the religious extremists, as inflexible and intolerant as the movements we seek to exterminate by our oh-so-crystal-clear-and-irresistibly-compelling rationalizations

Boa! Esse teu chapa comunista nem é de todo mal...

Although I'm also an atheist, I do not forget what is behind the power of religious thought. Quite simply: hope. Life is though, people suffer, and, rightly or wrongly, religion offers something for people to hold on to

Oh oh, too early. Religião não é nada disso. Não é "uma luz pra aguentar a noite". Não é sobre esperança. A matéria da Teologia não é o Evidente. É o Revelado (isso é São Tomás. Esses cientistas não lêem não? Pelamordedeus!! ). O conhecimento intelectual depende do conhecimento sensível (grande Heráclito, mais um não lido pelos çábios), mas transcende-o (obrigado, Parmênides). O intelecto vê em a natureza das coisas - intus legit - mais profundamente do que os sentidos.

Aliás, o engraçado é que a ciência deve tanto a Aquinas, e mal o conhece!!! Tomás Aquinas introduziu o seguinte conceito de Verdade: ela não estaria nem totalmente nas coisas, nem totalmente na Razão, mas na adequação entre a coisa e o intelecto: veritas est adaequatio speculativa mentis et rei. E tal adequação é possível pela semelhança entre o intelecto e as coisas, que contêm um elemento inteligível, a essência, a forma, a idéia. O sinal pelo qual a verdade se manifesta na nossa mente é a evidência; e, visto que muitos conhecimentos nossos não são evidentes,ie intuitivos, tornam-se verdadeiros quando levados à evidência pela demonstração. Ciência não é isso?

Although I'm also an atheist

O cara também é preconceituoso!! "Olha eu tb sou ateu, não sou um obscurantista religioso, mas eles lá precisam ter suas compensaçõezinhas por sua vida difícil e sem os estímulos intelectuais da nossa..." faça-me o favor!

Either we learn that science teaches us humility

Começo a achar que alguns mandaram assinar a lista nessa aula...

real need people have for spirituality.

De novo, o preconceito. quer dizer que crer em Deus não pode ser uma decisão racional? Mais Tomás de Aquino na cabeça desses iletrados:

Deus não é conhecido por intuição, mas é cognoscível unicamente por demonstração; entretanto esta demonstração é sólida e racional, não recorre a argumentações a priori, mas unicamente ex post partindo da experiência que sem Deus seria contraditória. Ele prova a existência de Deus pelos efeitos da existência de Deus. Isso não é racional? Assim, Tomás elege o mundo sensível como ponto de partida, cuja existência é dada pelos sentidos e utiliza a metafísica Aristotélica, revelando o seu gênio sintético.

As provas tomistas da experiência de Deus são cinco: "Cada uma delas se firma em dois elementos, cuja solidez e evidência são igualmente incontestáveis: uma experiência sensível, que pode ser a constatação do movimento, das causas, do contingente, dos graus de perfeição das coisas ou da ordem que entre elas reina; e uma aplicação do princípio de causalidade, que suspende o movimento ao imóvel, as causas segundas à causa primeira, o contingente ao necessário, o imperfeito ao perfeito, a ordem à inteligência ordenadora".

Ixpricando:

1a. - A do "Movimento"- É o argumento aristotélico do primeiro motor. ("não é possível admitir uma série infinita de seres que se movem, movendo por sua vez outros seres; logo, é preciso chegar a um motor que mova sem ser movido."). O movimento existe e é uma evidência para os nossos sentidos; ora, tudo o que se move é movido por outro motor; se esse motor, por sua vez, é movido, precisará de um motor que o mova, e, assim, indefinidamente, o que é impossível, se não houver um primeiro motor imóvel, que move sem ser movido, que é Deus.

2a. - A da "Concatenação das Causas"- Tudo está sujeito à lei de causa e efeito. Há, pois, uma série de causas eficientes, causas e efeitos, ao mesmo tempo; ora, não é possível remontar indefinidamente na série das causas; logo, há uma causa primeira, não causada, que é Deus.

3a. - A da "Contingência"- Todos os seres que conhecemos são finitos e contingentes, pois não têm em si próprios a razão de sua existência, são e deixam de ser; ora, se são todos contingentes, em determinado tempo deixariam todos de ser e nada existiria, o que é absurdo; logo, os seres contingentes implicam o Ser Necessário, ou Deus.

4a. - A dos "Graus de Perfeição"- Todas as perfeições admitem graus, que se aproximam mais ou menos das perfeições absolutas. Deve, pois, haver um ente sumamente perfeito, é o Ente Supremo - Deus.

5a. - A da "Ordem Universal"- Todos os entes tendem para uma ordem, não por acaso, mas por uma inteligência que os dirige; há, pois, um ente inteligente que ordena a natureza e a impele para o seu fim. Esse Ente Inteligente é...Deus.

Não dá pra ficar transcrevendo e explicando Aquinas aqui a todo o momento. Mas sugiro fortemente que você leia São Tomás de Aquino. No mínimo, vai aguçar a sua mente e te livrar desses preconceitos imbecis.

aliás, eu estou começando a discutir filosofia com o jimmy, já está na idade. e fico absimado como nós, que temos acesso barato à mente desses gigantes, que pensaram em como viver, o que é o mundo, quem somos nós, não damos a mínima! mal paramos pra pensar em qual nosso papel no mundo, o que é isso aqui, quanto mais ir verdadeiramente ao "ombro dos gigantes". ciência é necessária, espanta a escuridão da ignorância. Mas religião não é igual a ignorância.