The Philosophy Institute at Universidad Austral, together with Agape Libros, invite to the book launch of Roger Wagner’s and Andrew Briggs’ La Curiosidad Penúltima. La ciencia, en la estela de las preguntas últimas (Madrid: Sal Terrae, 2017, 520p), which will take place on Saturday 28 April 2018, at the Sala Victoria Ocampo, Feria Internacional del libro de Buenos Aires.
Professor Andrew Briggs is the inaugural holder of the Chair of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on materials and techniques for quantum technologies and their incorporation into practical devices. Current hot topics include vibrational states of nanotubes and charge transport through single molecules in graphene nanogaps. He has nearly 600 publications, with over 16,000 citations. In February 2016 Oxford University Press published his book with Roger Wagner entitled The Penultimate Curiosity: How science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions, in which they suggest a new reading of the dialogue between science and religion.
When young children first begin to ask ‘why?’ they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity.
These two manifestations of curiosityhave a history of connection that goes back deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book (a collaboration between an artist and a scientist) sets put to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and science: the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity.
