| A F T E R W O R D |
Aristotle in his Metaphysics states that "... For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters ... And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant ... therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end ... ' (1). That may be in the past! Today one discovers that only young children are curious having not been conditioned solely by their own practical interest: perhaps only the youngest among them. Joined by a few aged persons who, having refused to play the conditioning role of 'adult' at their own risk and peril, conform their expectations to those which allegedly urged Aristotle's contemporaries to investigate phenomena and assign causes to them. I must admit that I did not grew much from the time I became concerned with the Geological Sciences; and then, with Tectonics, a particular field within them; and then, going deeper into the mechanical behavior of matter of which the Earth is made: I soon discovered my abysmal ignorance. Believing it was my own fault, I looked for a drastic remedy. In those days it was customary to go overseas on a pilgrimage, hoping to drink deep from the most up to date and prestigious fountains of Knowledge. I found a way to join the migrating flock, but came back home more disconcerted than before. A single reassuring discovery: the ignorance was not completely mine! In fact, the New World was able to offer me more or less the same merchandise circulating in the Old One: recycled models, somewhat approximate, originally devised to describe the mechanical behaviors of 'materials' employed in engineering practice. Astonishingly, I had to attend a class there for engineering students to acquire some information about the many existing disagreements between such models and physical reality! The recognition of many unsatisfactory things is easier than the finding of a single remedy. To reduce my original ignorance a little bit - as I believe I have done - I needed a lot of years, In the meanwhile, my perplexity bew up, step by step, driving me to face more and more general and complex problems. During the whole journey, I had the opportunity to compare my ideas with those exposed in a large number of writings and to discuss them, all over the world, with several Specialists concerned with different scientific matters. But I have been supported by my ever-suspicious Pefko, who was born to play the devil's advocate. Even when living that endless story, which is the search for truth, from time to time one needs some rest, feeling satisfied to stay somewhere near to the truth: perhaps a little nearer than before. Then, talking of the work done, one cannot avoid mixing somr brass with the gold. That's not bad, I believe, if the purpose is not to persuade, but to make the Reader think. Thus, I expect now that those hearing my reasoning will not refuse the gold because of the mixed brass. The order in which I exposed my ideas has nothing to do with the ritual organization of a 'scientific publication'. Moreover, it does not reflect the real time-sequence of my experiences, but only the wish of occupy the attention of the hypothetical Reader. Poincar� states that "The scientist must set order: science is made of facts in the same way a house is made of stones, but an accumulation of facts is not science in the same way a disordered pile of stones is not a house" (2). The available 'stones', that is, the numberless documented experiences together with my few ones, justify the more or less sophisticated architectural portons of the Knowledge Manor, such as Thermodynamics, Newtonian Theory of Gravitation, Continuum Mechanics, Material Strenght, Einstenian Relativity Theory, Quantum Mechanics. Even purely 'logic' stones may give rise to useful ordered 'structures', as the Number Theory. Without any intention to distrust such significant details of the whole building, I presume that at the end of my long journey I may suggest a way to refurbish it; to make it less incoherent and its outline better defined. The outline of the Manor could become less faint just by reading between the lines of the Einstein's Relativity Theory to recognize the pseudoscalar character of time and its consequent intrinsic unidirectionality. There should be no need to saddle time with 'arrows', such as the thermodynamical, the gravitational, the radiation, the microscopic, the quantum, the cosmological, and, why not, the biological and the psychological. All these pointers-to-the-future could be thought of as mere consequences of an intrinsic peculiarity of time. The pseudoscalar character of time and what follows from it bring us to disclose an unexpected link between the space-time of Relativity and symmetry operations which, as the CPT, have been recognized in a completely different context: the realm of Quantum Mechanics. There is no need to recognize the intrinsic time unidirectionality in order to find the connection between Thermodynamics and Gravitation, To succeed one should refuse to see any probabilistic tendency to equilibrium in real systems, in spite of the advantage one can find in some circumstances by attributing such a property to descriptions of reality. The above admission, making untenable the common way of conceiving the thermodynamic time arrow, compelled me to commit myself deeply to hunting for the intrinsic unidirectionality of time. By connecting Thermodynamics and Gravitation we may put the deformational processes in their right scenario: a self-gravitating system. Both the ability in manipulating Matter - and not 'materials' - and the capability in understanding processes - not only deformational - occurring under our feet and over our head could benefit largely by such an approach. Moreover, it seems that the peculiar sensibility acquired by whom is concerned with the past of our Planet may help in re-examining the presumed occurrence of some unforeseable events, possibly made spectacular by an apparent accompanying failure of symmetry rules. All that it is needed to avoid almost mystical visions of bifurcations in physical processes is the utmost care in including into their descriptions the appropriate premises and in evaluating the risk for disadvantages which may result from elsewhere suitable simplifications; without mistaking mechanisms through which spontaneous processes occur for processes, structural elements (micro-systems of which macro-systems are made) for macro-systems, and phenomena, that is, what Humans may perceive during observation times allowed to them for complete processes! (3) That is what I tried to reveal, in a quite plain way, using everyday speech to save my Reader from needless trouble. After all, I was talking about light matter: the one standing just in the environs of truth (4). ------------------------------------------------------------------ (1) - Aristotle, Metaphysics, A2, 982b11-22. (2) - Julius Henri Poincar�, La science et l'hypothese, Flammarion, Paris, 1968. (3) - Bringing a physical system from an initial equilibrium state to a final one. (4) - I keep something more challenging in reserve. Provided that someone will be willing to read my next book, I could tell him why, according to Pefko, cos (1/alfa) = 1/e. |
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| Les alentours de la verit� |
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| A free copy of the whole book in English writing to [email protected] |
| A free copy of the whole book in English writing to [email protected] |