2023-06-17 20:27:46
Science is an exciting world, much more interesting, close and fun than it may seem at first, also more accessible if you know how to approach it with a clear vision of prejudices, a conviction that has led the physicist and professor from Avila Juan Meléndez Sánchez to republish a book in which he opens those doors to knowledge and enjoyment that is not complicated to assimilate from knowledge that is what has sustained, to a large extent, our society.
From Thales to Newton. A journey with science is the title of this book, now edited by Pirámide and presented yesterday at Librería Letras, through which «I try to make scientific culture available to any reader, explain how science works in a way I think is easy even to those who have no scientific basis”. Juan Meléndez has not taken the path of “explaining the latest avant-garde discoveries, as many popular books do, because on this path there is a risk of not really understanding anything, of having to believe everything as if it were a dogma of faith, And that’s kind of the opposite of science.” And since “science is based on criticism, on not taking anything for granted but always on questioning it, what occurred to me is that the best way to explain the spirit of science was to tell things that theoretically one knows, that They are relatively simple, they don’t have mathematics, but then when you get into the details of how they were discovered you realize that deep down you don’t know how to justify it, you don’t know very well how it happened, and yet you can. understand why it is simple.
The book “is a kind of journey through the history of science, almost biographical, in which science is like a small child born with Thales, growing up, coming of age with Galileo and Newton He is already beginning to really work and function in active life, he is already a man”. It is not that all this stopped with Newton, because «science has advanced tremendously, but what is the method and the way of working has not changed at all. So, I always say that this book is a bit the opposite of a typical popular book, which usually tells you a lot of super-advanced topics on the frontiers of science, with very advanced mathematics that you also cannot understand; Here what I intend to do is tell things that most people know, but in a very superficial way; that is, you know that the Earth is round, but you would not know how to prove why it is round. Or you know it revolves around the Sun, but explaining why would put us in a bind.”
In that journey from Thales to Newton «I tell the reader to forget everything he knows, to put himself in the shoes of a Greek from the sixth century BC, and from there to start looking with wide eyes, thinking , to try to understand what he sees. and little by little the development of science between these two geniuses is emerging. I believe that with what I offer the reader will understand how things work, and then he can read all the evaluation books he wants ».
«What I try», he summarized, is «to tell things that people may think they already know, but when they read it they will realize that they don’t know. And that is where the interest really begins, when you learn to unlearn to begin to understand where things come from, what you know and what you don’t know, because science is really understanding things, it is not staying in dogmas or science stories. fiction”.
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