Prior to his involvement in the recent Starmus Festival de Tenerife, one of the best celebrations of science, art and music that can be found today in the world, El País journalist, Paul Jáuregi interviewed Stephen Hawking, in a talk published in the same newspaper on September 21, 2014.Jáuregui ended the interview by quoting this famous British physicist reflection:
“Humanity is insignificant when compared to the universe that being a disabled person does not have much cosmic significance.”
He’s right.Probably for the same reason, not only his own condition, but all of the others would have no cosmic importance.But also, perhaps the entire history of events on planet Earth, including war, natural disasters or man-made, and perhaps even the existence of man, as an individual or as a human community.
Recently, Nature published an announcement, dated September 3, 2014, in which he made a graphical representation of the Laniakea, a supercluster which has more than 100 quadrillion of stars inside 100,000 large galaxies and nebulae, scattered and extended .Supercluster belonging to our Milky Way, which is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the overall set of Laniakea (hawain voice that means “big sky”).Earth, our planet, virtually, nor is there against such expansion or immensity.
Each time we feel small before the vastness of space, especially to the extent that physics and astronomy progresses and make us more aware of all these magnitudes and unimaginable distances of outer space.
When I was a boy of 13, living in that geographical point, called Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean Sea, discovered among the books that there was on the shelves of my beloved maternal grandfather, Jose Horacio Zorrilla Román, a work of the forgotten writer Italian Giovanni Papini. Papini, overcome one of the writers of Italy, who at age 15 had read over a thousand books in the library of his hometown, was the writer who influenced me. To my father Sotero Mancebo Noboa, I requested to give me Papini his more intellectually autobiography book “L’uomo finite” (Man finished) published in 1913, and where I learned the philosophical movement called solipsism.
Why speak of Solipsism when I start with the phrase of Stephen Hawking? I explain that Solipsism, term composed of the Latin words “[ego] solus (alone) and ipse (equal or same)” and means roughly “only I exist,” a stream of thought was very fashionable in the XVII and XVIII, which emerged influenced by the famous enthymeme of Descartes, who was the creator of the scientific method, when he said: “I think, therefore I am.”Well, this philosophical construction, intended to deny the reality of the objective existence of things.It was a belief metaphysics which stated that the only thing you could be sure of was the existence of the mind itself.Everything else was mental states of the self.That is, the reality was merely drops a river of images that are produced in our mind. When someone died, it was because that drop or image dried. If we had we did not give perceptions and meaning to them, there would be no Earth or the universe or science, or anything at all.
According to present observations of cosmology, dark matter and dark energy are a likely mass of more than 80% of the entire Universe. That is, that most of the matter in the universe that can not emit measurable electromagnetic radiation by our current technology and is only inferred from its gravitational effects, not seen.
Solipsism assumes that external reality can only be understood through me, since this is the only tangible reality; This establishes the impossibility to know objective reality, and even get to consider what you think is just illusion. In the appreciation of existence, solipsism can deny the reality of pain and death.
Emeritus Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Antonio Vaquero, published in the Society section of the newspaper El País, dated October 26, 2010, an article called “Latest news about God and the Universe,” which I would emphasize the following reflection he makes about the positions of Hawking stating that he assumes his known paradox of God to make it the paradox of the Universe:
“The last thought is to prove that Hawking incurs an identical paradox if God: The Paradox of the Universe.If the universe existed before time zero, then it is presumed a prior and separate existence of the things that were appearing, which we call the Universe. In that case, the predicate “the universe made itself” is false. In short, God is replaced by Universe besides things were created, but without altering the meaning of creator and creation “(sic).
Vaquero adds: “Today is demonstrable that, in general, things that are said about God not understood, have no reasonable meaning (explicable by reason)” (sic).
Regarding the inability to understand the things of God through reasoning that Vaquero postulates, in the book of Isaiah through the prophet is said: Isaiah, chapter 55, verse 9:
“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (sic).
On the cosmic insignificance Hawking states what is the planet, humanity and diseases, King David, in his Psalm No. 8, verse 4 stated: “What is man that you are mindful of him …?
I want to add to this intricate disquisition, the final monologue that Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Spanish Golden Age playwright, wrote when he puts in the mouth of Sigismund, in his book Life is a Dream, the following meditation:
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a fiction,
and the greatest good is small;
that all life is a dream,
and dreams are dreams.
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