Raffaello Cortina Editore

Is a science of the human being at all possible? And if it is, what is it for?

Lenin, Stalin, Gagarin, Majakovskij... Memorable funeral spectacles of the USSR.

The illness that has been diagnosed is scientific innumeracy, the cure prescribed: 120 “pills of mathematics”They say that mathematicians talk only to God, but this is certainly not true of Piergiorgio Odifreddi, a mathematician who not only converses with all branches of science, but is also on excellent terms with literature, art and philosophy. The illness that has been diagnosed is scientific innumeracy, the cure prescribed, 120 “pills of mathematics” of which the active ingredients are summarized in the sub-title. These “pills of mathematics” play the fields of the humanities and mathematics to show the reader, whether old, young or middle-aged, that mathematics is present – sometimes almost shyly, other times powerfully – in all aspects of culture: in those disciplines, ranging from physics to economics, where one would expect to find it, but also in less expected places, from novels to works of art. The cure does have a collateral effect, but a positive one: by the end of the book, you will know more than the contents of an encyclopaedia and you will be convinced that mathematics is superior to any other branch of science

The life, passion and resurrection of Jesus as recounted by a great scholar This “biography” of Jesus is constructed on the watershed between faith and historical fact. The opening pages provide a setting that isolates the historical-cultural and geopolitical coordinates of the four Gospels, after which the reader is accompanied in a journey through their pages that offer a composite of portraits taken from different perspectives rather than an academic reconstruction of a character and his story. Gianfranco Ravasi develops this profile of Jesus adhering to certain fundamental features, starting from his public life in the village of Nazareth, his speeches that frequently flowed into parabolic narratives, his hands that moved in surprising gestures, catalogued as “miracles”. Then the supreme sacrifice, his death by capital execution condoned by Rome. But just when the curtain falls on Jesus’s earthly existence, a new phase of his life opens, a discriminant without precedence, defined as “resurrection”.  Understanding this requires another descriptive channel, mainly consigned to a transcendental consciousness, known as the “Paschal Mystery”.  

Great discoveries that happened by chance. Serendipity and its heroes, from Christopher Columbus to Sherlock Holmes. How many times have you searched for something and come across something entirely different? A partner, a friend, a job, an object. It happens to scientists all the time: they design an experiment and the results reveal something totally unexpected, that often turns out to be quite important. This fascinating phenomenon is known as serendipity, coined from the Persian fable of the three princes of Serendip, sent out by their father to explore the world.In the history of science, this is how the greatest discoveries have been made. But here you won’t find the usual list of anecdotes about the discovery of penicillin, X-rays and microwave ovens. The most surprising serendipity stories reveal profound aspects of the logic of scientific discovery. These discoveries cannot be ascribed to fortune alone: serendipity springs from a mixture of astuteness and curiosity, of sagacity and accidents seized upon and transformed into knowledge in the blink of an eye. Above all, serendipity shows us things we didn’t know that we didn’t know. Following the success of The Natural History of Imperfection and Finitude, Telmo Pievani reveals the thrilling story of an idea. From Zadig to Sherlock Holmes, the numerous heroes of serendipity show us that Nature, out there, is always much greater than we ever imagine.

Santorini, the Pompei of the Aegean, Kos, the island of Hippocrates and so of health and well-being, Rhodes, a flower blossoming from the sea… The islands came into being before mankind. From the beginning the Greeks thought of themselves as a part of constellation of lands surrounded by sea: a myriad of stars belonging to the same galaxy. This was where the sun of our civilization rose: thousands of years ago, in those islands men began to build ships, and model idols from clay. These are wonderful places, the shores lapped by what is probably the most beautiful sea in the world, places where even as tourists it is possible to feel the breath of the gods and the heroes who lived there in antiquity.Following on Treading where the gods once walked. A mythological guide to Greece, this volume embarks on a quest for new beaches from which to enchant the reader with timeless tales of the heroes and the mortals who have made the Greek islands more than just a mark on a map, rather a place to which we dream of returning.

A philosophical detective story: how to find a meaning to existence if everything comes to an end? Camus and Monod provide an answer, in a compelling dialogue between fiction and reality staged by Telmo Pievani. The writer Albert Camus doesn’t die in that accident on January 4, 1960. His closest friend, the geneticist Jacques Monod, goes to visit him in hospital. They are writing a book together. They read the drafts, evoke memories of their adventures in Paris during the Resistance. A world vision starts to take form, full of disenchantment. Science has revealed the finitude of everything: of the universe, of planet Earth, all living species, of each and every one of us. How are we to find a meaning to existence, while accepting our finiteness?Camus and Monod review all the lay possibilities of challenging death. The investigation becomes a philosophical detective story. Maybe finitude does not imply nihilism after all, but rather solidarity, revolution, a life lived to the full. An elegant divertissement of fact woven with fiction, Finitudine is the story of a real friendship between two Nobel prize winners, a fascinating dialogue, a book within a book. Following on the success of his book Imperfezione.

In the history of evolution, it is not as much about being perfect as it is about being able to get by. In his Notebook B (September 1837), a young Charles Darwin wrote: “When one sees nipple on man’s breast, one does not say some use. So with useless wings under elytra of beetles, born from beetles with wings and modified. If simple creation, surely would have been born without them”. Where there is perfection, there is no history.Where there is perfection, everything has already happened. When we look at nature, our goal is not perfection. We should be interested in imperfections, because they are a promise of change, something is happening there and not everything has already been written. Evolution feeds on imperfections. Acclaimed Italian science writer and evolutionist Telmo Pievani, in the wake of the work of his masters like Stephen J. Gould and Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza, traces the history and the role of imperfection in natural history, starting with the tiny imperfection into the primordial quantum vacuum that gave birth to our universe from an infinitesimal and random physical anomaly, from a contingent fluctuation.The story continues with the evolution of our planet, randomly in the right place at the right time, the origin of life, the Great Oxygenation Event, the Cambrian explosion and its oddities,the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods and their anatomical imperfect adjustments. And again, other frozen accidents on the scene, like the lucky evolution of mammals, the imperfectionsof bipedalism in our family tree, the risky adaptations of human language and neoteny. Homo sapiens is the son of successful imperfections. And now, such an imperfect species is the master of the ecological world. Our body, our brain, our DNA are repositories of imperfections, and therefore they are so creative systems. Evolution works on existing constrained material and it does what it can, not the best. Tinkering is the right metaphor, not optimal engineering. In this brilliant book, Lucrezio’s clinamen is revisited for the first time through the lenses of contemporary science. Imperfection, like diversity, is seen as our major ally, not enemy. But imperfection associated with power could be dangerous. The title of the final chapter is: Would you buy a used car from Homo sapiens?

"Since their discovery in the mid-1990’s, mirror neurons have been one of the most intriguing and hotly debated topic in an amazing variety of disciplines, ranging from cognitive neuroscience and psychology to philosophy and anthropology. For this reason, we decided 10 years ago to write a book together in order to describe the functional properties of these apparently ‘magic’ neurons. The book had a great and long lasting success, with several translations in other languages. However, over the last few years a great deal of findings provided a much more detailed picture about the extent of mirror neurons and their properties. Indeed, mirror neurons have been found in very different species and in very different brain structures. And several studies suggested that they may function in a much more complex way than previously thought. This lead some scholars to advance doubts about the actual role of these neurons in cognition. Thus, a great challenge seems to urge anyone who is interested in the mirror story today, that is, providing a unitary account of the mirror mechanism and demonstrating whether and to what extent it might be involved in social cognition. Tackling this challenge is the main aim of this book. In doing this, we explore the properties of the mirror mechanism in both the action and emotion domains, by introducing and discussing some of the more recent and relevant findings. We also take in consideration what psychologists and psychiatrics variously labelled as vitality affects or forms.  Our main claim is that the mirror mechanism may provide an understanding of others’ actions, emotions and affects which can be mainly exploited just in ways that depend one’s own processes and representations involved in those actions, emotions and affects. What we think about others’ minds would be different if it were not for our abilities to represent our own actions, emotions and affects. The lack of these abilities may result in social impairment. This is the reason why we define the mirror-based understanding as an understanding from the inside. Such an understanding is not without consequences for our experiencing others. Indeed, it suggests that there are plausible aspects of phenomenal character that are common to experiences of our own and others’ actions, emotions and vitality forms, given that both experiences are shaped by the same processes and representations, or so we argue and provide evidence for".The Authors

"If we try to combine everything we have learned on the physical world in the XX century, evidence points towards something very different from what we learned at school about space, time, matter and energy. What emerges in an elementary structure of the world where time does not exist, space does not exist, generated by a swarming of quantum microevents. Quantum fields draw-up space, time, matter and light, trading information between one event and the other. Reality is weaved by a net of granular events; the dynamics tying them up is probabilistic; between one event and the other, space, time, matter and energy melt into a cloud of probability".“Time, space and matter are generated by a swarm of elementary quantum events. Understanding such deep texture of reality is the goal of quantum gravity, major challenge of contemporary science, where all our knowledge about nature is called into question”. Carlo Rovelli, one of the main protagonists of this adventure, leads the reader to the heart of the investigation in a simple and compelling way. He describes how our image of the world has changed, from antiquity to the most recent discoveries: evaporation of black holes, universe before the big bang, granular structure of space, role of information, absence of time in fundamental physics. "He draws a vast fresco of the physical vision of the world, clarifies the content of theories such as general relativity and quantum mechanics, brings us to the forefront of present-day knowledge and offers an original and articulate account of the main issues now open. Above all, he passionately communicates the fascination of this research, the enthusasm driving it, and the beauty of the new perspective on the world which science reveals to us".  "How is it possible that Carlo Rovelli has been able to write an essay in physics that kidnapes your attention from the first line to the last like the most absorbing of the novels? This is perhaps one of the few quantions not faced in the book. 'Reality is not What it Seems' is a marvelous book, with a stunningly vast vision of physics."