Curiosity and conversation, sources of knowledge

«In science, everything we see, look at, observe, and experience are answers, answers given by reality. Nature responds, the researcher asks,» wrote Jorge Wagensberg in his book El gozo intelectual. Wagensberg, who passed away a few days ago, was a doctor in Physics, professor in Theory of Irreversible Processes and, since 1991, the director of the Science Museum of Barcelona, which today we know as CosmoCaixa.

With his loss, we not only lost a physicist, but we also lost a poet, as his gaze and way of understanding the world always connected science with philosophy. Listening and observing others, bases of his way of understanding the world. And questioning, the basis of discovery and knowledge. If we already have all the answers, what we lack are questions. According to Wagensberg, doubt is the only thing we should have faith in, something he spoke about in another of his books. Science and knowledge are reached through curiosity, and conversation is both the starting point and the end point.

In one of the last interviews he gave to ALMA, he said that science and dialogue were precisely the foundations on which he founded CosmoCaixa, a space where the Amazon rainforest coexists with light games and with objects that make physics a palpable subject. A museum built on the idea that what drives a scientist to investigate is the same thing that brings people to science museums: the desire to talk with what surrounds us, a true revolution in museology.

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