The abolition of man

C.S. Lewis

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote a book with the same title as this post. In that year, the second world war was in full swing, but the book is not about the war, but about more fundamental questions, such as the moral degradation of man, which was then quite advanced and is worse today. This is how Lewis explains this degradation:

Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

Utopias and Dystopias

Utopias, the descriptions of fictitious perfect societies, owe their name to Thomas More's Utopia (1516), a title of Greek origin that literally means nowhere. Before and after More's work there have been many other utopias, each one to the liking of its author, for the question of the perfect society gives a lot of play to the imagination. Examples include Plato's Republic, Tomasso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888, see this post), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), or Aldous Huxley's Island (1962).

A Canticle for Leibowitz

This novel, one of my favorites in the science-fiction genre, belongs to the catastrophic subgenre, also called post-apocalyptic. This is its summarized argument:

An atomic war has destroyed our civilization. After the catastrophe, the surviving masses hate science and books, considering them responsible for the tragedy. In the same way as after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church collects the remains of knowledge and preserve them for posterity, so they can be used by a new civilization, capable of understanding them, if one day it would arise. But when this happens, history repeats and man self-destructs again.

Science or imagination?

A large part of the "scientific" research currently being developed, rather than being science, is just an exercise of the imagination of "scientists." It seems that we must consider as scientists all those who do mathematical speculations that have little or nothing to do with reality. And naturally, everything a scientist does is “science”. At least, scientific journals and high-profile media consider it as such.

Do black holes have hair?

Black holes are strange objects. They are accumulations of extremely compact matter, which exerts such huge gravity that at less than a certain distance (the event horizon) nothing can escape their attraction, not even light. Hence their name.

The existence of black holes had been predicted in the 18th century by the English geologist John Michell and the French astronomer Laplace. At that time nobody paid attention, but from 1915, when Einstein formulated the theory of General Relativity, the interest in these mysterious objects grew. It was soon concluded that when a massive star exhausted its ability to produce nuclear fusion reactions, no force of nature would be able to overcome the gravitational pull of the remaining matter, resulting in a black hole. But for a long time there were doubts about their real existence, for the theory seemed to predict that the matter located inside a black hole would occupy a zero volume and therefore would have an infinite density. As physicists usually suspect that infinity is a mathematical concept that cannot happen in real life, there were two possibilities: either black holes do not exist, or Einstein's theory would have to be modified so that they wouldn’t have an infinite density.