Diferenças que fazem diferenças: ondas gravitacionais e limites da escala humana
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Data
2025-09-23
Autores
Santos, Wither Favalessa dos
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Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo
Resumo
This thesis emerges from a crossing situated between disciplinary fields and distinct modes of knowing. It is built upon close engagement with theoretical physicists, but also as an ethnography: a gesture of listening, presence, and writing that seeks to make visible the ways in which these researchers relate to the worlds they attempt to describe, predict, or even invent. The fieldwork experience, lived in the in-between space of the celestial regimes of physics and the everyday materiality of scientific institutions, was marked by conceptual, affective, and epistemic displacements that required constant repositioning. The research did not begin with a fixed object but with a gradual and porous movement of approximation. Black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmic expansion appeared as everyday matters, traversing discussions, calculations, intuitions, and disputes. In this process, listening to gravitational waves also became a methodological figure: a way of orienting ethnography, attentive not only to what is clearly stated, but also to what vibrates in the noises, silences, and hesitations. Inspired by the metaphor of the “mud wave” (Creado and Helmreich, 2018), the research explores gravitational waves from a perspective that does not separate their material from their symbolic dimension. Fieldwork included publications and events organized by the Center for Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravitation (Cosmo-UFES), such as the Cadernos de Astronomia issue dedicated to gravitational waves, an online short course on the primordial universe, and the Astrophysics Winter School held in Matilde-ES in August 2023. The ethnography highlighted the interferometer as a device that (re)configures the dynamics of the world, enabling cosmological re-elaborations, and brought forth the problem of scale, underscoring the centrality of the human scale in scientific ontologies. Rather than seeking syntheses or reconciliations, the thesis wagers on inhabiting the differences between anthropology and physics, making them a fertile ground for thinking science, world, and knowledge.
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Antropologia da ciência , Cosmologia , Relações entre humanos e não-humanos , ESCT