Never, ever reach peace through dogma. 

—G. W. Friedrich Hegel

Introduction

 

Only when we place cosmology at the forefront of our attempts to engage with nature and accept its destabilizing effect on traditional physics, thereby eliminating the fog that surrounds the formal discourse of science established by the practices that shaped society, is it possible to clearly see the consequences of accepting that truly fundamental science is historical. Understanding the revolutionary scope of this historicity is what we will address here.

 

I. The Universe of Solidarity

 

1. Until recently, microphysics and, more broadly, terrestrial physics were considered outside the cosmic context. They seemed to require no further explanation; they were treated as self-referential systems that didn’t admit any form of extrinsic analysis to constitute a self-consistent rationale. However, in recent decades, cosmology has abruptly invaded this tranquil domain of dominant positivist thought and destroyed the rational peace of those who believe that humans on Earth have a special role in the universe.

 

2. Cosmic interference in local physics should not be understood as the substitution of one absolute reason for another absolute reason. It is not a question of exchanging the absolutism associated with the universal character of local physics for the absolutism of global physics. The issue is a bit more complex. Mathematician Albert Lautman beautifully summarizes what is at stake in his book Essai sur les notions de structure et d'existence en mathématiques [Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics]. In examining the local-global dichotomy, he proposes an extremely interesting alternative with far-reaching consequences. He refers to the possibility of producing an organic synthesis between different mathematical theories that deal with local-global connections and that choose the predominance of one over the other. Lautman argues that it is necessary to establish a powerful connection between the structure of the whole and the properties of the parts, so that the organizing influence of the whole to which the parts belong is clearly and precisely manifested in those parts. This perspective, which seems to embrace ideas and programs borrowed from both biology and sociology, can emerge in mathematics as a process of synthesis. To achieve this, we must abandon the Russell-Whitehead principle of reducing mathematics to atomistic logical structures, as well as the Wittgenstein-Carnap view that mathematics is nothing more than a language indifferent to the content it expresses. This is similar to what happened in relativistic cosmology in the last decade, with the abandonment of the Penrose-Hawking axiomatization, which was structured to support the identification of the existence of a single moment of creation of the universe, separated from us by a finite time.

 

3. The question then arises: how do laws change? The stability of the laws of physics observed in terrestrial laboratories is due to the fact that their dependence on time involves cosmic times. This means that only by observing the universe on a large scale can we observe this process of modification. Important examples for detecting this evolution would be the analysis of nucleosynthesis, which determines the abundance of chemical elements in the universe, as well as the examination of the processes that gave rise to the excess of matter over antimatter, exceptional phenomena that occurred at an extremely dense stage of the universe at the beginning of the current phase of expansion.

 

II. Appearances

 

4. The initial question concerns the status of the reductionist principle, so important to physicists. This principle, which enjoyed extraordinary success throughout the twentieth century, holds that any process in nature, any system, regardless of its degree of complexity, can be explained by reducing it to its fundamental elements—for example, those described by microscopic physics. Applying this principle to the universe, it was simplistically concluded that no new effect could modify the laws of physics based on a global analysis of the universe. This principle, called “from microcosm to macrocosm,” was used as a guide for addressing cosmic questions.

 

5. Mendeleev’s table brought notable advances in the understanding of properties common to different substances. Without the notion of atoms, of fundamental elements of all bodies, we would have great difficulty making sense of and understanding a large number of processes we encounter in everyday life. However, it was taken to such an extreme that it went from being a useful tool for analyzing reality to a concept inhibiting thought. We moved from molecules to atoms, and from these to the most elementary components, protons and electrons, and, continuing this procedure, to quarks and possibly other fundamental constituents. Reductionism to elementary components was understood not as an attempt at understanding based on observations, but as a practice of thought that takes on the role of a superlaw to which every scientific proposal should submit, as if it were a truth exempt from further criticism.

 

III. Practices

 

6. We can learn from the history of ideas the enormous difficulties that the program of scientific self-criticism we are describing will inevitably face.

 

7. This proposal disqualifies the idea that scientific knowledge can be identified as a quest to discover the Rosetta stone of physical processes—an automatic translator of the laws of nature and their representations, an illusion that ideologically underpins many scientific procedures. Curiously, the effectiveness of these procedures is independent of this ideology.

8. Thus, we enter the realm of cosmology. But, as we have previously seen, we cannot be content with the automatic extension of physics to the confines of the galaxies without examining the path the universe has taken. Man cannot fail to consider his point of view as supremely relevant, as producing his history. At the same time, his presence in the cosmos must be considered as accidental, not essential, otherwise it would give rise to a kind of “self-adulation,” an extension of the concept of the individual introduced by Flavia Bruno.

 

IV. Antecedents

 

9. A science like cosmology does not enter the social scene as the establishment of a political order, but as knowledge. It is from this territory that messages interpreted as orders are sent, and from which consequences are drawn that act on the social order. Along with other scientific knowledge, it offers truths, free of charge.

 

10. As scientists ourselves, the first question we must clarify is this: Should we consider this movement to be self-criticism, or can we allow others who aren’t scientists to judge how well we are functioning? Can we allow criticism that has not been established in our field of action to penetrate our territory? Perhaps they won’t even accept our way of deciding what is important and worthy of being the object of our study? Or should we only accept internal dissension, which is often seen by those on the other side—by those who believe in science and do not question it (perhaps because they feel unqualified to do so)—as the stubbornness of those who (still) do not possess “true knowledge”? How can we show internal criticism, which tends to diminish the power scientific activity has accumulated over the centuries?

 

11. We cannot accept the reduction imposed by the society of physicists that characterizes cosmology as nothing more than extragalactic physics (with possible changes, conventional or not)—that is, the application of the laws of physics constructed in terrestrial laboratories and their vicinity, the universe. Consequently, we attribute to those who seek to associate the analysis of the universe beyond the simple formal application of the laws of physics an external orientation, beyond science, to metaphysics, as if this served as a disqualifying accusation. In fact, this attribution functions to disguise what was understood in the foundational years of the 1920s as “the cosmological question,” seeking to emphasize with this term the problematic aspect of the application of physics to the universe.

 

V. Declaration

 

The self-criticism with which we begin this manifesto highlights a certain malaise that affects the scientific way of thinking about what exists.

 

Rather than lose its intimate connection to philosophy, science must serve to free humankind from submission to a singular project of understanding the world. Unfortunately, this is not how things are because of scientific activity’s current subordination to world-building technology.

 

The illusion of the ironclad configuration of terrestrial physical laws, the hypothesis of their unlimited application to the cosmos, and their intimate and complete dependence on the anthropomorphism that dominates them produce powerful forces that prevent the construction of this freedom in practice.

 

However, scientific activity, as we identify it in this text, can fulfill this liberating function. After all, we walk the same path, along with philosophers and other thinkers; we shouldn’t even consider the idea that we have chosen different discourses to describe and comment on the world.

 

VI. Process and Historicity

 

• The entire spatial volume of the universe varies with cosmic time. There is a dynamic that pushes the origins of the cosmos back to a distant time, possibly into the infinite past. We understand this as a process, with different actors dominating the cosmic scene at different periods of condensation.

 

• The cosmic dependence of these elemental interactions—for example, the processes of the decay of matter governed by Fermi’s interaction—causes a shift in this interpretation. To make this process dependent on cosmic time is to introduce, even in a limited way, history into the process of its analysis. It is to accept that the universe must be understood through the evolution of its physical laws.

 

• This process of historicization is mild—that is, it allows for a description in simple formal terms, one associated with known formalisms that can be understood through configurations observed in terrestrial laboratories.

 

• An example of hard historicity appears when we understand that the phenomena to be described, associated with the evolution of the metric structure of space-time, present bifurcations.

 

• The formal origin of this is found in the nonlinear nature of the equations for gravitational interaction that describe these processes.

 

• In other words, it is not necessary to go beyond the analysis of the physical universe to understand its origin, since a nonlinear process does not require an external source to give rise to it. 

 

• It is out of these considerations, out of these analyses of the evolution of the universe and its basic laws, that we develop the self-criticism initiated here.

VII. Questions

 

Initially, it was a matter of verbalizing what can and cannot be said within scientific discourse, listing questions that seem fanciful or are understood to be associated with unrealizable processes—that is, controlled utopias; ideas that, although belonging to a correct formal system derived from a current theory, are abandoned due to their fanciful, strange appearance. They are understood to be incoherent due to an anthropocentric reading based on the complete identification of physical nature with human nature, which ignores the various levels of complexity and organization that constitute real obstacles to this. The origin of the difficulties in this identification, as well as the impossibility of translating all processes from microphysics to the universe based on the use of the Newtonian dialect—the way of describing reality through the quotidian language of classical physics, generated in the times of Newton and his companions—can be understood by recognizing the error in the extrapolation that attributes a universal and absolute character to it. Lines of research then emerge that address issues that are not resolved within the conventional setting and are then classified as utopias, associated—for example—with the following statements.

 

VIII. Controlled Utopias

What cannot be said:

 

12. There may have been (the use of the temporal here is improper) other worlds;

 

13. It is possible that the universe is still forming or is incomplete; 

 

14. The laws of physics are not immutable. The cosmic dependence on interactions demands a new way of understanding the evolution of the universe; 

 

15. These variations allow us to map different space-time domains of the cosmos;

 

16. Limiting our considerations about the universe to causal regions constitutes a formal limitation that, outside of an absolute dogmatism, no scientist can justify, as in Gödel’s acausal structures; 

 

17. Comments on the infinite past origins of the universe;

 

18. Analysis of the bifurcations of the cosmos and the consequent alterations in causation throughout the evolution of the universe that generate its historicity;

 

19. The cosmic void and white holes injecting new matter into the universe;

 

1. The cosmos as an open process, a meeting ground for the diverse ways created to reflect, understand, and produce reality.

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*This is an extract from the free translation of the book Manifesto Cósmico, published by n-1 edições in São Paulo in 2022.