El blog de Manuel Álvarez López: 12.12.11

Los cuatro consejos de Steven Weinberg, Premio Nobel de Física 1979, a los jóvenes investigadores

Cuatro consejos para sobrevivir en las aguas del oceáno de la investigación: (1) Nada o ahógate; (2) mientras no te ahogues, dirígete a la zona de aguas peligrosas; (3) disfruta mientras nadas; y (4) estudia el estilo de otros nadadores. Nadie lo sabe todo y tú no tienes que ser el primero. Nos recuerda Steven Weinberg que cuando acabó su carrera universitaria la investigación en física le parecía un océano inmenso que tenía que explorar antes de ponerse a desarrollar su propia tesis doctoral. Le parecía que no sabía casi nada de física, pero gracias a los grandes físicos que le enseñaron en sus cursos de doctorado descubrió que para sobrevivir en el océano tenía que nadar o ahogarse. Weinberg cuenta con sorpresa que lo hizo y le funcionó. Obtuvo en poco tiempo un doctorado y aprendió que “nadie lo sabe todo y él no tenía que ser el primero.” Permíteme una traducción libre de los cuatro consejos de Steven Weinberg en “Scientist: Four golden lessons,” Concepts, Nature 426: 389, 27 Nov. 2003.

Nos cuenta Weinberg que cuando estaba dando clases a finales de los 1960 en el MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) un estudiante le dijo que quería cambiar de tema de investigación desde la teoría de la relatividad general a la física de partículas, donde trabajaba Weinberg, porque los principios de la primera eran bien conocidos y los de la segunda un enorme embrollo. Weinberg confiesa que pensó que él no lo hubiera hecho, pero ahora cree lo contrario. Hay que meterse en líos porque allí es donde está la acción.

El tercer consejo de Weinberg es que hay que perder el tiempo, no basta con seguir las indicaciones del director de tesis, incluso si él nos guía hacia la solución de problemas importantes. Nadie sabe en qué momento de la historia serán resueltos los problemas realmente importantes. Nunca podrás saber cuáles son los problemas correctos que te llevarán a la gloria, por lo que la mayoría de los problemas en los que te enfrasques serán una pérdida de tiempo. No importa, si quieres ser creativo, tienes que asumir que tendrás que pasar la mayor parte de tu tiempo trabajando en problemas que no son creativos.

El último consejo de Weinberg es aprender algo de la historia de la ciencia, o al menos de la historia de tu rama de la ciencia. No hay que olvidar que pequeños descubrimientos en apariencia, en el momento oportuno, producen toda una revolución en una rama de la ciencia, con repercusiones en la tecnología y en toda la sociedad. No hay que olvidar que los protagonistas de estos descubrimientos muchas veces no son conscientes de lo revolucionario de su aportación y Weinberg es un buen ejemplo. Quién le iba a decir a Weinberg que su artículo de solo 3 páginas “A Model of Leptons” iba a ser la teoría correcta que describe la unificación electrodébil, el núcleo del modelo estándar, la teoría que le dio el Premio Nobel de Física en 1979.

Richard Harper

Valerie

Marie-Eve

Agnes

Christelle

Skye

Marie-Eve

Victoria

Christelle

Cecile

Yana

Karen

Marian

Julie

Elizabeth

Marian

Marie-Eve

Gregor Von Rezzori

Ariane Ascaride

Sabrina

Self-Portrait

Fuentes: American Gallery y Richard Harper.

Frequently Asked Questions about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

By Steven Pinker. (Aquí en español).

Questions about Definitions

How do you define “violence”?

I don’t. I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

What about metaphorical violence, like verbal aggression?

No, physical violence is a big enough topic for one book (as the length of Better Angels makes clear). Just as a book on cancer needn’t have a chapter on metaphorical cancer, a coherent book on violence can’t lump together genocide with catty remarks as if they were a single phenomenon.

Isn’t economic inequality a form of violence?

No; the fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

Questions about the Origins of the Book

What led you to write a book on violence?

As I explain in the Preface, it was an interest in human nature and its moral and political implications, carried over from my earlier books. In How the Mind Works (518–519) and The Blank Slate (166–169, 320, 330–336), I presented several kinds of evidence that violence had declined over time. Then in 2007, through a quirky chain of events, I was contacted by scholars in a number of fields who informed me there was far more evidence for a decline in violence than I had realized. Their data convinced me that the decline of violence deserved a book of its own.

You’re a linguist. What made you think you could write a work of history?

Actually, I’m an experimental psychologist. Better Angels concentrates on quantitative history: studies based on datasets that allow one to plot a graph over time. This involves the everyday statistical and methodological tools of social science, which I’ve used since I was an undergraduate—concepts such as sampling, distributions, time series, multiple regression, and distinguishing correlation from causation.

Does this book represent a change in your politics? After all, a commitment to human nature has traditionally been associated with a conservative fatalism about violence and skepticism about progressive change. But Better Angels says many nice things about progressive movements such as nonviolence, feminism, and gay rights.

No, the whole point of The Blank Slate was that the equation between a belief in human nature and fatalism about the human condition was spurious. Human nature is a complex system with many components. It comprises mental faculties that lead us to violence, but it also faculties that pull us away from violence, such as empathy, self-control, and a sense of fairness. It also comes equipped with open-ended combinatorial faculties for language and reasoning, which allow us to reflect on our condition and figure out better ways to live our lives. This vision of psychology, together with a commitment to secular humanism, has been a constant in my books, though it has become clearer to me in recent years.

How and why has it become clearer?

Though I have always had a vague sense that a scientific understanding of human nature was compatible with a robust secular morality, it was only through the intellectual influence of my wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, that I understood the logic connecting them. She explained to me how morality can be grounded in rationality, and how secular humanism is just a modern term for the world view that grew out of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (in particular, she argues, from the ideas of Spinoza). To the extent that the decline of violence has been driven by ideas, it’s this set of ideas, which I call Enlightenment humanism (pp. 180–183), which has driven it, and it offers the closest thing we have to a unified theory of the decline of violence (pp. 694–696).

Continue reading in Steven Pinker web.