Arquivo para a ‘Física’ Categoria
Worldviews, science and religions
25
Mar
Worldviews are more closely related to
philosophy and cosmology, but in literature they are also linked to science and religion. Geocentricism (the earth as the center of the universe) and the Copernican revolution, which declared the sun to be the center of the universe, correspond to scientific and religious views and both were limited worldviews.
In Heidegger’s ontological vision, he updates the term Weltanschauung, which first appeared with Kant, who understood this idea of worldview only through experience with the sensible world. For Heidegger, these are values, impressions, feelings and conceptions of an intuitive nature, prior to reflection, and thus correspond to a “worldview”.
The connection with cosmology is important, we have already highlighted the Copernican revolution, and today the influence of the discoveries of the James Webb space observatory has even contributed to a broader view of the creation of the universe, and if it was not created, and has “always” existed, this further favors the worldview of the eternal and the infinite.
The universe also informs us of scientific and religious facts, the vision of the information paradox theorized by Stephen Hawking about small radiations that “escape” from the black hole broadens the cosmological and scientific vision, while the guide star that indicated the place of Jesus’ birth could well be a new one or a supernova, a star that is born or that dies.
Scientists and observers of the cosmos are expecting the birth of a “new” star in the next few days, the name given to binary systems of a dwarf star and a red giant that explode and give off the intense glow of a rising star.
The subject has taken over astronomers’ fantasies because since September 2024 TCrB (T Coronae Borealis), the binary system near the constellation of the Crown, is about to explode.
Astronomers are predicting that the explosion is about to take place in the early hours of March 27. The TCrB (now called the Blaze Star) is 3,000 light years away and the constellation of the Crown is close to the Serpens Caput and the Bootes (pictured above).
While we observed eclipses, comets and meteors, our vision was still geocentric, looking at a wider universe corresponds to a wider world view, we have left our terrestrial bubble to admit celestial realities that are more universal than our pale blue dot.
This expression came about when the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on February 14, 1990, at a distance of six billion kilometers from Earth (passing the planet Saturn), and having completed its mission, at the suggestion of Carl Sagan, turned towards Earth and looked back to take a photo.
Particles, sounds and language
14
Feb
Matter was studied in smaller and smaller
particles, the atoms idealized by Democritus (460-370 BC) in ancient times, but for him they were indivisible, eternal and immutable, but modern science began to see them in smaller and smaller sub-particles.
Initially protons, electrons and neutrons, in the 1930s Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli predicted the neutrino, but it was only detected in 1956 by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reine, in the 1960s George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann predicted quarks, which were discovered in 1968 at the Stanford Linear Acceleration Center.
Then came Gluons, Leptons, Mesons and Hadrons to complement the Standard Model of Physics, the name given to the unified theory of physics in the 1970s. In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC in Genegra) detected the Higgs boson, which was a subparticle predicted to unify the theory, but questions remain: what is dark matter, what happens in a black hole, what causes the gravitational force, are there graviton particles?
One theory developed to answer these questions was string theory, which dates back to 1919 when it was developed by Theodor Kaluza, then Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Leonard Susskind, John H. Schwartz and Michael B. Green, to name but a few important and well-known physicists.
The up and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons, joined by the force of gluons, would form different vibrations that would compose themselves to form elementary particles, so the whole universe could be the result of primitive forms of vibrations, sounds that could be outside the audible ranges.
It attempts to unify quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, and may be a more unifying model than that of standard physics.
So we can say that sounds are the primordial “language” of the universe and everything could be composed from it. The observations of galaxy formation and black hole behavior made by James Webb could confirm or deny this theory.
In the same way, the universe would be a being of “language” in the form of vibrations formed by string theory, and our word would be something much more important than we imagine, not just because it has a certain power, but mainly because it is part of the early universe and develops with it into its most complex forms of nebulae that form giant and small stars, red giants, white dwarfs, novae and supernovae, neutron stars and black holes.
The complex universe would be in its most elementary form through up and down quarks, various forms of strings that would make up what we call matter.
An paper by the director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), Ooguri Hirosi, and the project’s researcher, Matthew Dodelson, on the theoretical effects of strings outside the black hole’s photon sphere, was published in the journal Physical Review on March 24, 2021.
An event that didn’t happen in 2025
26
Dec
Scientists predicted the formation of a star
from a white dwarf and a red giant, T Coronae Borealis (T CrB), around September, when these two would meet in a huge explosion that would be seen even with the naked eye, but it hasn’t happened yet.
They would form a nova, which unlike a supernova, which is a star “dying” – the terms are imprecise astronomically and are only didactic – a nova is the birth of a star, so the phenomenon of life and death in the universe is very common and wonderful.
The formation of a nova occurs from the approach of a White Dwarf, which is a body with a very dense mass comparable to the Sun and a small volume comparable to Earth, as there is no fusion inside the White Dwarf its luminosity is weak, while the Red Giant has a low or intermediate luminosity, in which there is a process of fusion of hydrogen into helium.
The approach of the two forms a new star and this “explosion” is what was predicted for this year, so for now, T Coronae Borealis, is a binary star (a white dwarf and a red giant) whose fusion will form a star with this name, because it is located near the constellation of Coronae Borealis.
A Supernova, on the other hand, occurs when a “giant sun” with a mass greater than 10 times our Sun, explodes and reaches the end of its life and also produces a very intense glow, forming either a neutron star or a black hole, the best known of which is Betelgeuse (or Alpha Orionis because it is in the constellation of Orion) saw a drop in brightness in October, which could be an indication that its explosion is near, but no date has been set.
T Coronae Borelis is about 75 light years from our Sun, which is relatively close in terms of astronomical location; Alpha Centauri, our neighboring galaxy, is 4,367 light years away.
It’s the cycle of life in the universe too, and explosions and flares in Novas and Supernovae not only give an intense glow, but also indicate a new reality for celestial bodies.
What is the universe made of and what is its origin?
30
May
Greek philosophers from the 6th century BC
believed that the four elements of all nature were: fire, earth, water and air, Pythagoras proposed a practically religious school that everything was numbers while Democritus proposed the atom and that they would have rounded, smooth, irregular shapes and smooth, being able to form an infinity of elements, but until the end of the Middle Ages it was believed that fire was composed of one of these particles: the firegist, we owe the chemical table to Dimitri Mendelev who in 1869 organized his chemical elements, previously the alchemist Henning Brad discovered that phosphorus heated with urine residue caused flames and Antoine Lavoisier in 1789 organized some elements into simple, metallic, non-metallic and non-metallic.
Current standard physics has established 7 elements: neutrinos, electron, quarks, photon, graviton, gluon and weak force boson, but there is a more mysterious quantum world that of superstrings, it seems frightening or using the physicists’ word ghostly (Einstein used it the first time realizing that there is a third state in quantum physics in which the element is neither nor is it, later called the Included Third).
The most convincing theory of the universe until recently was that of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, entropy, Stephen Hawking was its great theorist, although this theory already existed before, and thus proposed an “arrow of time” in his most important book. famous “A brief history of time” (1988), but James Webb’s discoveries called into question when he found galaxies and celestial bodies at the edge of the universe that shouldn’t be there, now even the arrow of time is questioned.
The important thing when looking at the universe is to understand where everything came from and whether this whole thing and intelligent life, which for now we only find on our planet Earth, had a beginning and more importantly, had an intention.
The biblical “fiat lux” seems to agree so much with the Big Bang theory, before atoms there were waves or “strings” created in the first 10−44 seconds (Planck time) and then subatomic elements were created, in the case of strings, everything It is initially formed by one-dimensional strings that would be divided into “open” strings (linear) and “closed” strings (in loop strength), vibrating at different frequencies that would give rise not only to the 7 elements, but also the molecules that initiate life.
Be that as it may, there was an initial moment, and the form of this “being” must have been preceded by a creative “being”, the paleontologist and Christian theologian Teilhard Chardin proposed that the entire universe would be the body of this supreme “Being” of the “being”, thus he should have a divine and a material (human) reality, thus he proposed that the universe is Christocentric.
It is not possible for the All to have emerged from nothing, and if there is an original form of the All, of some “element” the physical world is composed, thus there is a “Corpus” of this All, with the difference that He is the creator and all the rest created, but created with some substrate of its own Supreme Being, of course the theory for this is more elaborate, but its understanding is simple, we are part of a body, of a group that communicates, the idea of the individuation of the universe is not plausible, because at the beginning we were one thing: a small cosmic corpuscle, a set of vibrating strings (we could even think of a choir making a song), but there was a moment of creation. and Someone created it.
Me, the Other and the Hidden Third
03
Apr
The principle of uncertainty that came from
physics, starting with Heisenberg, at the beginning of the last century gradually put Physics in check, putting scientific determinism, logicism also in check due to Gödel’s paradox which determined that an axiological mathematical system or it is complete or consistent, and cannot be both at the same time, but a new scientific and ontological vision was emerging, Transdisciplinary Ontology.
In the week of July 13 to 17, 2008, the 9th. The Metanexus Institute’s annual conference, held in Madrid, Spain, between philosophers, biologists, physicists, cosmologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, historians, educators, theologians and community leaders took place with the theme “Subject, self, and Soul: Transdisciplinary approaches to Personhood”, where Barsarab Nicolescu was invited to open the Conference.
In it Nicolescu will develop the idea of the hidden third, philosophy had already spoken of the Other through Lévinas, Ricoeur and the educator Martin Buber, who in the book “I-Thou” recognizes in the other something “divine”, but stops there as the others, stop at the edge of the concept of otherness.
Nicolescu went ahead, writes like Heisenberg a model for overcoming the subject x object dualism, characteristic of modernity: “: “We can never reach an exact and complete portrait of reality (Heisenberger, 1998, p. 258). The incompleteness of the laws of physics is present in Heisenberg, even if he makes no reference to Gödel’s theorems. For him, reality is given as “textures of different types of connections”, as an “infinite abundance”, without any ultimate foundation” (Nicolesceu, 2008)
Citing Heisenberg, Nicolescu states, citing Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and Cassirer (whom he knew personally), that it is necessary to suppress any rigid distinction between Subject and Object.
The idea of the hidden subject in Nicolescu is beyond the threshold I and the Other, it is in the conception that comes from physics that there is a third state in nature, the Third Included beyond Being and Non-Being, he calls them the Transdisciplinary-Object and Subject-Transdisciplinary, in quantum physics it was already clear that the analysis of an Object phenomenon must be transdisciplinary due to a then unknown state in nature, now also a Transdisciplinary Subject is described by Nicolescu (calls it TD-Subject) which reveals the Hidden Third.
Although the theme talks about the soul and even talks about spirituality, for a good biblical reading it is necessary to understand the unveiling of Jesus after his death (appearance is a limited term) which reveals itself in a surprising and divine way to the disciples, the Hidden Third is Himself.
In the passage of disciples who are walking to Emmaus and a Third walker infiltrates among them, when they see the breaking of bread they will soon remember their “conversation”: “Then one said to the other: “Wasn’t our hearts burning when he spoke to us along the way, and explained the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
The information paradox in the cosmos
14
Mar
The issue of information with black holes is that
any object that falls there and you will never see it or have any information about what happened, even the merger of two black holes is impossible to undo, you cannot separate them and what happens?
Black holes just don’t seem to preserve any information.
Throughout the history of science, our scientific laws were written based on quantifiable observations, this information is certain measurable physical properties of matter and energy. A molecule or particle, such as a proton or an electron, for example, contains a mass value, an electric charge, a spin and several other quantum properties (number of baryons, leptons, hypercharges, etc.).
However, there was the famous Higgs or “God” particle, something that attributed mass to others and an experiment at the Large Particle Collider (hadrons) managed to detect it, in a black hole that absorbs a certain amount of particles, matter and energy throughout of time, itself is made up of particles with unique properties, and so it should contain a significant amount of information, but where is it?
The right question is where did this amount of information go? In theory, a black hole made from the collapse of a normal star, where the emerging black hole can be observed, has completely different encoded information than a black hole made from the collapse of an antimatter star (considering it possible), for example.
This is not a violation of Newtonian physical laws, but rather quantum theory itself, because when Stephen Hawking applied the rules of quantum mechanics to black holes he discovered (or supposed) that isolated systems would emit a form of radiation, called radiation. Hawking, which would be independent of the initial state of the black hole and would depend only on its mass, electric charge and angular momentum.
If information is not preserved or evaporates entirely through Hawking radiation, there is a paradox: among the most accepted hypotheses currently is string theory, the main candidate for a new unified theory of nature, which accepts that information really escapes from a black hole.
So if you jump into a black hole, you won’t necessarily be gone forever; Instead, information from your body may emerge, particle by particle, to reconstitute you in some way from these small waves, called “strings”.
Observations from the James Webb super space laboratory and continuous studies into the frontiers of thought will take us even further, towards the confines and enigmas of the Cosmos.
The included third of physics and thought
17
Jan
The fact that we are trapped in dualism, A
and not-A, Being is and Non-Being is not, and now transformed into political thought as if nature and society were just always two options in conflict with no third (or even the fourth and fifth options) is an outdated thought if we look at the logical paradox developed by the physicist Barsarab Nicolescu that finds parallels not only in quantum physics (photo), but also in social and ontological thinking: the third option.
So much so that this is true that Barsarab’s own text that calls for a reform of Education and Thought (Barsarab, 1999) indicates that this change can be seen as a way out of the center of a crisis greater than physical or logical issues, says Barsarab : “One thing is certain: a large gap between the mentality of the actors and the internal development needs of a type of society invariably accompanies the fall of a civilization”, or said in another, more ontological way, between Being and non-being -Being there is a state of Non-Being that breaks dualisms and paradoxes.
Both Barsarab’s letter that calls for an education reform, and other thinkers such as Edgar Morin and others perceived a crisis in modernity with roots in thought and education, the theorist of the Included Third T, gives a worrying sentence: “The risk is enormous , because the continuous expansion of Western civilization, on a global scale, would make the fall of this civilization equivalent to the burning of the entire planet, in no way comparable to the first two world wars”.
There is also a linear and monodirectional thinking where intentionality is always polarized and creating a “single” and monochromatic path, with the eternal danger of authoritarianism and misuse of power, to detente it will be necessary to have a more open world where everyone is included and not just what is convenient for power.
Education must support and assist this context, Barsarab says in his letter: “The harmony between mentalities and knowledge presupposes that such knowledge is intelligible and understandable. But can this understanding still exist, in the era of the disciplinary big bang and extreme specialization?”
The harsh reality of the pandemic shows that we oscillate between true solidarity and detente to face the crisis, and the opportunist polarization that wants to take advantage of the deaths and deviations of a poorly managed health crisis, in some countries more, but in almost all .
Barsarab’s sentence, which seems harsh, is not: “Is there something between and across disciplines and beyond each and every discipline? From the point of view of classical thought there is nothing, absolutely nothing. The space in question is empty, completely empty, like the vacuum of classical physics”, in this epoché (the Greek vision of emptiness) a true philosophy can flourish, even when it is not (the suspension of judgment, new horizons beyond the pre -concepts, etc.) is what it is.
NICOLESCU, Basarab. The manifesto of transdisciplinarity. Trans. Lúcia Pereira de Souza. Brazil, São Paulo: Trion, 1999.
Globalism or Universalism, a new period
05
Jan
The current crisis clearly points to a civilizational
crisis, Eurocentric and Enlightenment visions already showed their exhaustion in previous periods, by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Shopenhauer who sought elements in Western philosophy, but quantum physics and studies on an era called “anthropocene ” such as the transdisciplinary studies of Anna Tsing, founder of AURA (Arhus University Research on the Anthropocene) and one of the editors of the Feral Atlas (feralatlas.org) published by Stanford University Press.
Thus, the theories of globalism and NWO (New World Order) are nothing more than conspiracy theories, although the political forces at play may also have influences from various political organizations that desire new forms of imperialism and population control.
Simply looking at an increasingly complex universe in which old Copernican and Newtonian paradigms, of great influence on Western thought, die, show a much more complex reality, such as string theory pointed out by Michio Kaku as one of the few alternatives to explain the universe as we now see it through megatelescopes.
Even Einstein’s idea of understanding the mind of God is very far from what a theory of Everything and the Whole really means, where it is almost impossible not to think of a Being with an unimaginable intelligence who created everything, a simple energy or chance is simplistic Too many and even theoretical physicists such as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku have admitted this hypothesis.
However, it is difficult to imagine a mega-intelligent consciousness in the face of such primary reasoning that involves the majority of Christian thinkers, figures such as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scottus and Boethius, these last two are considered saints by Catholics, seem to be overshadowed by a fundamentalist primarism that ignores the complex universe we live in and which still reveals itself to be incomprehensible within human limits.
For serious religious people, it would be enough to examine the visit of the wise (see youtube) men (people from other beliefs and cultures) who came to worship the newborn in Bethlehem to become aware that God is universal and is not limited to human dictates and customs, but there is a lot of false prophecy.
The limit of a true Christianity should be as Augustine of Hippo said: “the limit of Love is to love without limits”, this should be essential to a true God of Love.
The 3 Wise kings – Documentary Discovery Civilization l Dublado l – YouTube
The mystery of black holes
04
Jan
The center of the Milky Way, the galaxy where our
solar system inhabits, is formed by a disk with spiral arms and a dense, yellowish central region known as the “bulge” and there are around ten billion stars orbiting the colossal object that is its center called the supermassive black hole Sagittrius A*.
So, if in the past geocentrism (the Earth as the center) was a naive idea, now Heliocentrism (the sun as the center) is also a provincial and outdated idea, but what black holes are, it was not Einstein but Karl Schwarzschild who was the first to propose its existence.
Steven S. Gubser’s book “The Little Book of Black Holes”, deals in a simple way, as much as possible, explains Einstein’s special and general relativity and Schwarzschild’s equations that gave rise to the topic, black holes are one of the strong themes in current astronomy and one of the sources of research for the James Webb mega-telescope.
The book begins by recounting an experiment carried out on September 14, 2015, almost a hundred years after Einstein announced his theory of general relativity, two massive detectors, one in Louisiana and the other in Washington, were carrying out a gravitational wave experiment when they detected an audible signal, such as a serious knock and five months later they announced that they had detected two colliding black holes forming a larger one, the discovery was spectacular.
Both black holes and gravitational waves were predicted in Einstein’s Theory. In this theory, the black hole is a region of space-time (the notion of absolute time and space has already been overcome) where all nearby matter is attracted and is impossible to escape.
There is a popular saying that everything that goes up must come down, says the author, however the idea of the Schwarzschild equations is that nothing can go up, only come down and in the case of black holes where does that which must come down go, that is, what happens to what is attracted to the black hole.
We know the story of the apple that would have inspired Newton’s law of universal gravitation, the author of the book then suggests an apple falling into a black hole.
An apple outside the black hole events everything is static, at the horizon of these events everything is dynamic, flowing towards an all-encompassing singularity (where space-time changes dynamically in an extraordinary way, there two dimensions compress and the third is stretched.
Stephen Hawking, famous for proposing Big Bang equations, speculated that black holes are not actually black, they have their color (in fact, outside our visual range of colors from violet to red) determined by temperature, energy and entropy of its surface (if we can call the two dimensions that, since it is space-time).
This simplified introduction is developed over seven chapters of the book, in astronomical details and their equations, which requires some more specific knowledge of physics.
Gubser, Steven S., Pretorius, F. 2021. The Little Book of Black Hole. US: Princeton Press, 2018.
Physics and the mind of God
03
Jan
The basic original question of man is language,
but when searching for information man was forced to look at the universe and try to understand its enigmas, geocentrism (the earth as the center of everything), heliocentrism (the sun as the center of everything) dominated human language and thought for millennia, throughout this time anthropocentrism dominated human conception and with this the attempt to dominate all of nature grew.
However, nature is indomitable, modernity was an attempt to dominate the forces of nature and assert anthropocentrism over it, but it has its own logic, and when looking more deeply the universe that had a mythological explanation moved to a more focused focus. clear of eschatological inquiry: where did we come from and where are we going.
The book by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku: “The God equation” takes a deep dive into this issue from contemporary physics and cosmology, the physicist is the great theorist of string physics (Hyperspace is one of his books), professor at Harvard and host of programs on Discovery Channel.
In his book he explains the quest of physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein to try to explain all the forces of the cosmos, what is called the theory of everything, and which in its current formulation is called the Standard Physics Theory, the discovery of quantum forces of particles, including the Higgs boson, the vision of the photon with a particle of zero mass, the particles of terrestrial magnetism helped this unification, but that’s not all.
Many physicists have failed, the quantum explanation breaks with the idea of “thing” that some dualist authors continue to have, the “quantum” is something beyond it has a third state, called in physics the “third included” where a particle is between the Being and Non-Being and is not dual.
If this state of quantum physics is already a reality, what the particles actually are is still a mystery, and the “most promising candidate (and, in my opinion, the only candidate) is string theory, which says that the universe it is not made of point particles, but rather of tiny vibrating strings, where each mode of vibration corresponds to a subatomic particle” (Kaku, 2022).
We would need a microscope powerful enough to see electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc. they are nothing more than vibrations of tiny loops, similar to rubber bands. If we put these elastic bands to vibrate countless times and in different ways, we will eventually be able to create all the subatomic particles in the universe, and this means that the laws of physics are summarized in these modes of vibration of the small strings.
Kaku says in the introduction to his book: “chemistry is a set of melodies that we can play with them. The universe is a symphony. The mind of God, which Einstein eloquently referred to, is a cosmic music that spreads across space-time” (Kaku, 2022).
Kaku, Michio. 2022. A equação de Deus (The God equation). Trans. Alexandre Cherman, Brazil, R.J.: ed. Record, 2022.
