REPÚBLICA SEM CIÊNCIA (REPUBLIC WITHOUT SCIENCE)

[ Sat. Nov. 13. 2010 ]

We stood on the "third culture" and Brazil, ignoring his history of science, scientists and the links between arts and sciences and humanities. It is true that Brazil has never received a Nobel (neither science nor the other areas, though some writers have deserved), but came close a few times (with Carlos Chagas and Jayme Tiomno, for example, and not with Peter Medawar, British born Petrópolis than 50 years ago received the Medicine and Physiology). And might not have gotten there because both neglect dedicated to the subject. When you see the vast literature on science emerged in the last 40 years and thinks the Brazilian case, where only recently appeared names like Marcelo Gleiser and Fernando Reinach, the melancholy of the comparison is inevitable.

The Vezo is worldwide, I know, like when you read stories of modernism at the turn of the 20th century would not talk about Einstein and Bohr, only a maximum of Freud (who was a doctor and, contrary to what many think, very friendly knowledge of brain physiology to understanding the mental complexity — and today would be impressed with the new scanning technology). But historians and sociologists Brazilians not only ignore science in his portraits of the time, but also ignore their achievements. In the U.S., where there is both religious conservatism, science has always had acute stress. And there appear initiatives such as the Edge website (www.edge.org), made to house the thoughts of authors such as Damasio,Dennett and Dawkins — to get the letter D — that try to connect to the humanistic scientific culture. ...

...The art, by the way, almost always spoke with science, because both can add knowledge, or at least a mutual defense and sound. It's been like painting by Leonardo da Vinci (who developed the veiling to be more faithful to the visual perception) to the fiction of Ian McEwan (although I liked less than solar, about a physicist involved with the issue of global warming, than Saturday), through the refraction of light by Rembrandt and Picasso's angular concurrences.

We need to rescue the role of scientists in Brazil's history and treat the subject in much better schools and publications. Although there are few initiatives here and there, with the importance of a FAPESP, there is still much room for improvement in production and thinking about science. Consider the recent obituaries in local newspapers with names like Martin Gardner (who knocked so many defenders of the existence of paranormal and UFO proven) and Benoit Mandelbrot (inventor of the concept of fractals, that some people think it was a kind of mystic of impurities, an intuitive holistic) to see how the emphasis of science is small in our culture. The republic would gain much knowledge and method to convey to their students.

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