Marina Cortês
Ticks of time: on Cosmology, Everest, and Ballet
Ticks of time: on Cosmology, Everest, and Ballet
For the past couple of years we’ve witnessed increasingly worrying events taking place in our planet. This is now a planet that few of us recognise, with astonishing events taking place at ever faster rates. I chose to speak today, on International Day of Women in Science on a positive note, on the key role that women scientists will play in shaping the future of our planet.
In recent years, there have been several leading scientists calling for a scientific revolution. This is a change of paradigm to switch from reductionist methods to non-reductionist thinking. Nowhere is this need stronger than at the foundations of modern science, in theoretical physics. For myself this change began in 2019 when I founded biocosmology— a scientific field that portrays the universe as seen though the lens of living systems, of the biosphere.
What is non-reductionism? It is a way to study and understand systems as a whole, instead of breaking the system in parts, which is the way that we have been doing science for the last few centuries.
However in the last hundred years Reductionist thinking has led to more and more paradoxes in science. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the collision of general relativity and quantum mechanics. These are incompatible theories, and give rise to the riddle of quantum gravity.
So non-reductionism is having a birds-eye view on the systems we are studying. Why I am bringing this up on the International Day of Women in Science? Because women have, evolutionarily, played the role of keeping systems around them safe and settlements together, ensuring the safety of the group, of the whole. Men have, also evolutionarily, played the key role of hunting, which requires a different kind of thinking, linear thinking, and a single focus on the prey in order to succeed.
In broad terms, we can say that, so far, science has been based mainly on linear thinking. Right now in this century we notice that we need to shift to techniques that use global perspectives of systems as a whole, using a birds-eye perspective.
This is true in quantum mechanics for example, and also in the most complex of all sciences, in social sciences. Interestingly, the simplest systems, quantum mechanics, and the most complex systems, social sciences, both require context-dependent notions, and ideas.
These new thinking tools may help the problems at the root at the foundations of science. They certainly can contribute to a gravitational theory of quantum mechanics, and that is really exciting to work on.
However these novel ways of thinking can help our problems that we face, as a whole, as a planet. We are used to think about the profit of the individual, or the profit of the city, or that of individual nations. These are linear ways of thinking, living as if we were separated from one another.
We are not yet understanding that in the end, linear thinking brings loss of all of us. A bottom-up approach does not work because the planet is round, not squared. So if we move in straight lines there will always be something left that we didn’t cover, we will not close the circle.
Top-down approaches may surprise us because in this kind of problem solving everyone wins. These win-win approaches look impossible currently, because we are still thinking in this linearly profit way, rather than global profit. If we can think as a bird, hovering above the whole, holding the big picture in mind, we may discover a whole new landscape of solutions.
Since women have, for millennia, been thinking in this way, they are visionary strategists in top-down problem solving. I come to argue that women will play a key role in the shaping of our science and in seeing our planet safely overcming the hurdles we face today,
We are living very exciting times, and I for one cannot wait to see our planet gently shift its path towards a truly inclusive, global paradigm for the future. It is a privilege to be alive in these times. It is a privilege to share this mission with you, moving humanity to the next level. And it is a privilege to live together in this pale blue dot that we all share. I’ll see you soon.
