Translation Rights TQE / I, The Superfluous and the Error

The scientist Jorge Wagensberg investigates how two seemingly separate fields such as science and literature can feed off each other.  Science aspires to the maximum possible objectivity and intelligibility, and so the scientist must omit his I (his identity, emotions, and preferences), concentrate on what is essential to his object of study and, obviously, unearth the error. At the same time, the best literature usually works around the author’s own ego and experiences. What is superfluous in literature provokes pleasure in its nuances, and the literary «error» frequently becomes a brilliant intuition about reality. The reciprocal enrichment between scientific and literary comprehension brings up interesting questions: What if science recuperated, within certain limits, the I, the superfluous, and the error? What if writers momentarily gave up their subjectivity and observed nature with the maximum possible objectivity? What if a scientific idea could shed light onto an aspect of the human condition? What if a personal anecdote marked the beginning of a scientific intuition in the future?

After presenting a new possible genre of scientific literature, the author offers us some delightful practical examples of his theory: one hundred and eight stories about science (containing an objective and intelligible observation of reality) and about literature (the narrator and his personal circumstances are omnipresent). These ironic, hilarious, and sometimes distressing tales are always alive with the wish of masterfully conjugating comprehension and emotion.

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.