Translation Rights TQE / If Nature Is the Answer, What Was the Question?

In his many conferences, books, articles and university classes, Jorge Wagensberg has found that the essence of his contributions could be synthesized in one fortunate thought, one sentence that traps the primordial question. And so as Wagensberg states in the prologue, «today I almost mistrust any idea that cannot be stated in one single phrase.»

After thirty years dedicated to questioning himself about reality, the result is this collection of aphorisms. Its four part structure suggests an organised siege of that which interests us most in our complex environment: Reality, Life, Knowledge, and Civilization («ethics are the aesthetic of behaviour»). Sometimes a vademecum of thoughts that can stand on their own, and other times a small treatise with minimal development, this group of thoughts about uncertainty is surprising due to its new perspective and to the sharpness with which it treats fate and time, living creatures and their evolution, art and science as complimentary forms of knowledge, or coexistence and the transmission of knowledge as the pillars of a civilised community.

Jorge Wagensberg (Barcelona, 1948), Doctor of Physics, is professor of Irreversible Process Theory at the University of Barcelona. He not only investigates and disseminates science, but is also a dynamic promoter of the debate of ideas, which has achieved him Catalonia’s National Prize for Scientific Thought and Culture, among other awards. He is the director of our Metatemas collection and is now responsible for the Scientific and Environmental Area of the “la Caixa” Foundation, after having directed the scientific museum CosmoCaixa, a reference for science museums around the world. He is the author of a dozen books and of many works of investigation on thermodynamics, mathematics, biophysics, microbiology, paleontology, entomology, scientific museology, and the philosophy of science, as well as of journalistic articles on a number of different topics. We have published six wokrs, among them Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿cuál era la pregunta?, La rebelión de las formas, A más cómo menos por qué and El gozo intelectual.