Enrique Gracián: "The beach sand is in danger of extinction"

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ENRIQUE GRACIÁN (Barcelona, ​​1945).

Mathematician, scientific communicator and former deputy director of the TVE

.

In

(Harp) he travels from the confines of matter and the universe to the inexhaustible inner world of our mind.

Living beings are made with a very limited sample of pieces, right? That's right, life is built with just a dozen items, most of which, curiously, are grouped together in the upper-right part of the table. Carbon is the great element? For us yes, for us it is key. And it is logical because of the enormous capacity it has to build many compounds, to make all kinds of bonds ... But that does not mean that on other planets where there may be other forms of life, the key has to be carbon. There are other elements, such as silicon, that could play that role. Reading your book I have learned that several trillion atoms are needed together to give rise to some form of matter, something that can be touched ... That's right. Atoms are very tiny, and to create something that is perceptible in any way by our senses there has to be a brutal amount. When we talk about matter we do it in reference to ourselves, to some very specific detectors that are the five senses. But if you use more sophisticated detectors, you start to detect smaller matter. However, matter is something strange, if I am not mistaken, the usual thing in the universe is vacuum, that there is nothing, or at least nothing that we can detect ... Yes, especially regarding what is called dark matter . Dark matter is matter that cannot be seen but is known to be there and is proportionally much larger than other matter. What we colloquially understand by "matter" is barely 4% of what is in the universe. You draw a parallel between dark matter and our unconscious. What would that parallel be? We know that dark matter exists because it exerts an action. Things happen in gravitational fields that we don't know what produces them, so there must be a matter that, even if we don't see it, performs a function. What we call unconscious is something to which we do not have direct access but which we deduce that it exerts a great action on us, there are even those who consider it to be decisive in our way of acting, thinking or feeling. And the unconscious, like dark matter, is somehow hidden. Explain to me that we can't really touch anything, that there is always a space between us and what we touch. When I hug my son, for example, is there always a certain distance between us, do we never become fully united? Effectively. When you hug your child there is a cloud of electrons in front of another cloud of electrons that are repelled. We don't really have any chance to play fully. Yes, that possibility exists but then there is a destruction, if an atom penetrates another atom we are facing a nuclear reaction that supposes the destruction of that atom. In everyday life we ​​actually live completely isolated, and I believe that deep down we have a clear awareness of that isolation. Do you mean that the feeling of loneliness that we all sometimes have can respond to a physical reality? I have no doubts about it. That physical reality leaves an imprint on us, that essential solitude is something that deep down we are constantly present. There is only one element in the periodic table discovered by the Spanish: tungsten, isolated by the brothers Fausto and Juan José Delhuyar and which played a very important role in World War II, right? Yes, because of its ability to withstand high temperatures. Tungsten is what the filaments of light bulbs that become incandescent were made with, precisely because of its ability to withstand very high temperatures. And it was discovered that it also served to shield tanks and to make ammunition that could pass them. This caused a huge demand for tungsten. Today there are beginning to be items that are very scarce and, if an alternative is not found for them, in a few years we will not be able to have this conversation because there will be no mobile phones. What elements are those that endanger the existence of mobile phones? Graphite, lithium and cobalt, essential for the manufacture of batteries for mobile phones, tablets, computers, electric cars ... They are already in short supply and may run out. And also the beach sand is beginning to be an element in danger of extinction. And why is beach sand disappearing? Because it is essential to make cement. Cement is an element that is used a lot in construction, and desert sand is useless to make it because it lacks biological elements that sand from the beach does have. There are already beaches that have completely disappeared and there is starting to be traffic of beach sand. Our technological civilization is doing a massive exploitation of the environment. We are getting as much as we can out of certain elements regardless of what happens next. Are we not able to create the elements of the periodic table? All the elements on Earth come from outer space. For example, there is water there is, it follows a few cycles and we use it. Earth is a finite planet and its resources are too. And some elements take so long to make, such as oil or coal, that we cannot wait for nature to make them again because it would take millions of years. If I have understood you correctly, you say that every material body has a wave associated with it ... Yes. What happens is that the length of that wave can be very large or very small. There is a range in which, by means of devices, we can detect these waves and even use them, this is what we do with radio, television or when we speak on the phone. Wavelengths that are very large we cannot detect because they would require giant antennas, perhaps the size of the Earth. But the fact that every material body emits waves is very interesting because it means that we as human beings, with our brain, are also constantly transmitting waves. So when you sometimes feel that you "connect" with someone, it could be that there is literally a connection between waves? I think so. There is still an important field of research there. We know very little about the construction of the inner world. But if that inner world is immersed in a physical reality, it must be governed by the same laws. It would not be totally unreasonable that thought transmission could exist or that someone notices a presence that they do not see ... And although our inner world may seem small and dark, it can be as large as the entire universe. What are the great unknowns that remain to be discovered? For me the great challenge now is in the inner world. Before it was thought that the world ended in Finisterre, and then it was thought that the universe ended in our galaxy. But first America was discovered and then it was discovered that the universe did not end in our galaxy, but began there. I believe that the great challenge is our inner world. In physiological studies, much progress is being made in the study of neurons, of whether memory is there or there ... But we know very little about emotions, the unconscious or the language of the inner world. And physics, mathematics, do they have something to say? Yes. Mathematics, for example, is something that is generated in the inner world. Intangibles are built in the inner world, and mathematics is pure intangibles. But a technological civilization like ours is difficult to deal with the inner world because we are too immersed in technology, in tangibles. Speaking of tangibles: there is the button. The button is perhaps the emblematic device of what a technological civilization is: by pressing a button we can do an enormous amount of things that we have no idea how to do. You push a button and you start the washing machine, you pull a trigger and you kill a person, you push a button and you start a nuclear power plant or you fire an intercontinental rocket. Everything has been reduced to the button. If we were to show the results of the last years of our civilization, we would have to do a button show. Inside the button there is a huge amount of algorithms, that is, things that work by themselves. When you press the button, you don't want to know what happens, you just want the result to be as expected. And that makes up a very specific type of person typical of technological civilizations. What kind of person does the button generate? When we are touching buttons all the time, even if it does not seem like it, we are losing initiative. We believe that we have the initiative to press the button, but when you live immersed in buttons, you are losing initiative, and that initiative is being taken by what I call 'the bug', a device, a kind of living being that is growing and from which we we are beginning to be cells.

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