The humanities seem to experience an existential dilemma: while researchers are charged to engage in public debates on major challenges of the contemporary world, such as global changes and the manipulation of genomes, departments suffer from a lack of resources and humanists have the form of expression of their ideas questioned by scientists, journalists and other audiences.

There is also the difficulty for the dissemination of academic work by traditional means due to the high costs of printed editions and subscriptions to journals.

For historian Michael Elliott, from Emory University, the digital publication of humanistic production should change this scenario with all the technological possibilities already available, allowing the academic dialogue with audiences external to the university and even influencing the form of the knowledge production of the area. Elliott discussed these issues at the conference The Humanities and their Publics, held on April 19.

Two editorial events of 1996 in the United States illustrate the reduction an expansion dynamics of the public of the humanities in the last 20 years, he said:

• the publication of the article Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, by physicist Alan Sokal in the journal Social Text;

• the launch of an online archive dedicated to English romantic poet William Blake.

"Sokal's article was a hoax and argued that achievements of the natural sciences such as quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity are social constructions, citing the icons of the humanities at the end of the 20th century, as Jacques Derrida and Bruno Latour. He was concerned about the lack of rigor of the humanists when they speak of objective reality", he said.

Sokal's article received considerable attention of the international press. Some have accused him of being anti-academic and anti-intellectual, but most intellectuals have supported him, Elliot said. "By attacking the humanities when they speak of nature, he delineated his space and put them in their place. The humanities became more humble and no longer wanted to focus on other audiences."

In the case of the William Blake Archive, motivation and results were the opposite, Elliott said: "It was one of the first electronic text repositories on the Internet and provided everything one expects from an online archive, containing poetry and images of manuscripts, illustrations, pictures and watercolors by Blake, as well as essays on him”.

The archive has been designed as a resource for research by postgraduate students, undergraduate and postgraduate professors, high school teachers and enthusiasts of William Blake's work. For Elliott, the archive has all the expected requirements for a work of the humanities: support of a foundation, approval of a university, and participation of experts and technical personnel.

For Elliot, the two publications have quite different views of academic work in the humanities: "Sokal's article criticized the humanities and pushed them back to the ivory tower; the archive on Blake, in turn, had a fairly new and fascinating format, but at the bottom it contained a traditional vision of learning”.

Tradition vs. to be advanced

He said he read in a text by Martin Grossmann that one of the important issues for the IEA is the contrast between tradition and to be advanced, adding that these two forces were closely related in the United States of the 80’s and 90’s.

At the time, the National Endowment for the Humanities, a government funding agency, complained of the intellectuals' inability to speak to non-academics and their overly critical tone towards American culture, he said. "That has changed a bit, but still persists". A few months ago, according to Elliott, William Adams, the new director of the agency, said that "there is a lot of skepticism in the public sphere on the value of the humanities to understand the political, economic and social context of today."

In reaction to this, Adams suggests that academics review the curricula of undergraduation and collaborate with scientists instead of criticizing them, according to Elliot. He cited Adam’s statement: "We must re-engage in the public environment in a whole new way and need to talk more affordably when we do our work".

Intellectual impostures Two years after the false article by Alan Sokal was published in the journal "Social Text", he and fellow physicist Jean Bricmont published the book "Impostures Intelectuelles", which criticizes the use of concepts of natural science by thinkers and post-modern philosophers, incorrect according to their view. On April 27 and 28, 1998, both attended the symposium "Visions of Science: Encounters with Sokal and Bricmont" (photo), organized by the IEA, in which researchers from different fields discussed the ideas presented in the book, which had just come out in France.

There is also criticism in the American press. Elliott said journalists complain that there are no more public intellectuals as there were in the past, capable of talking about challenges such as the manipulation of the human genome, climate change and racial disparities. "Journalists like when an intellectual speaks in a way so they can understand".

Conflict

Given this scenario, Elliott believes that the human sciences in the United States are in a sui generis position: "They are haunted by the ridicule public to which they were subjected in the past [Sokal's article] and at the same time have to engage in public debates with the help of new technologies".

With the credentials of being a historian of American culture of the 19th century, Elliott pointed out that this kind of conflict situation is not new in the United States.

American higher education in the 19th century was dominated by small colleges that had the teaching of liberal arts and the humanities orientation as their mission, he said. "They were just a step away from becoming religious schools. They were aimed at training from the imported English idea that universities exist to teach knowledge, not to create it".

This system was challenged, he said, by the creation of research universities, first in Germany and then in the US. "This led to the creation of new universities, such as Chicago and John Hopkins, and to the change of orientation in others".

The university model concerned with the liberal arts and the training of professionals, and the model dedicated to postgraduation and research competed for a while, until the universities began to rely on the two lines of action, he said. "The University of Chicago, for example, has created relevant degree models, and at the same time laboratories for research and important areas of postgraduation".

Homepage of the William Blake Archive's website, created in 1996

With the adoption of this mixed model, the liberal arts became popular, according to Elliott. The result is that undergraduate students in the United States are generalists. "There are many courses for training in liberal arts and this helps to create a more democratic citizenship, which is the result of a very broad education. If a professor teaches English literature he will teach in a room where people become lawyers, physicians, architects or financiers. Then, in research seminars, they will teach to anyone who will specialize in a profession. As professors they should reach both audiences. This model worked well until recently".

Model in jeopardy

Elliott’s hypothesis is that this model is now in jeopardy in all areas, with a more pronounced crisis in the humanities, because a broader education based on them no longer has the support they had. According to him, the main reasons for this are:

• the lack of consensus on what a general education is;

• the high tuition prices, due to which students want the graduation disciplines to be more targeted for the vocational training they wish;

• reservations about the political stance of humanities’ professors, often critical of American institutions;

• the idea that undergraduate students are no longer representatives of the general public ("This is curious, because the current diversity of students in terms of ethnicity, social class, gender and others is greater than ever before").

Elliott believes that there is also a crisis of the production of the researchers. "In the US, the journals are not of free access and subscriptions are very expensive. To subscribe to journals, libraries need to reduce the purchase of books and other publications."

This situation will lead to a new organization in the way how academics do their work and address to the public, increasingly multiple due to the features of digital publishing, evaluates Elliot. Thus, in his opinion, the format of academic publications will change because of new publishing and distribution technologies. "These changes will change the concept of what it means to be a scholar in contemporary society."

He said that researchers from the humanities perform many works on environment, climate change, health, education and "that such works are consequential because authors must engage in public debates to address to non-academic audiences too."

"In the US, printed monograph has a kind of aura [as the unique work of art, according to Walter Benjamin], in spite of being mechanically reproduced, and it is worshiped by a small audience. Will the academic work lose its aura by moving to digital formats? Will academic sites, side by side to common sites, become less numerous? I do not think so. We will be seeking audiences engaged with the academic content and this will be good for academia and the rest of society".

The Emily Dickinson Arquive brings together facsimiles of the manuscripts of the poet

Experiments

For Elliott, the William Blake Archive is a standard digital project, with the parameters of the editing work approved by the Modern Language Association of America, an institution that brings together academics of Letters.

He commented on three projects that go beyond the standard formalism. One of them is the Emily Dickinson Archive, dedicated to the American poet of the 19th century. "She has not published any poetry while alive, so her manuscripts are very important, but are stored at Harvard University and the access to them is almost impossible. The alternative is to access the digitized material".

A different project for its public outreach is the Voyages – Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Databse. "It is designed for scholars studying slavery, but as soon as it was published it was found that there was interest from other publics, such as genealogists and black Americans, the Caribbean and Brazil, who wanted to trace their origins. To serve them, the website owners have changed the presentation of the information".

Recently posted on Internet by Stanford University, the project Enchanting the Desert has been highlighted by Elliott as a multimedia-mode monograph. The project produced by geographer Nicholas Bauch deals with the history of the photographic record of the Grand Canyon. It contains a text of about 80,000 words, photographs, geographic information and audio clips, and can be appreciated in different ways. "One can imagine a printed book of the project, with texts and photographs, but there would be an extreme lack of data, restricting possibilities".

Voayages, a project on slavery

Debate

In the debate that followed the conference, Martin Grossmann, former director of the IEA and coordinator of the IEA's Research Group Fórum Permanente: Cultural System Between Public and Private, said it is important to analyze the situation of human sciences from the political point of view and that at USP there are also difficulties for what is public to be used by society: "We have museums with very important collections and whose mission goes beyond teaching and research, because we have a duty to keep these collections and make them accessible to the general public".

Grossmann also commented that the model for the public university deployed in Brazil generates a strange situation, with public money funding sophisticated and expensive public universities for privileged people, leaving to private universities the function of absorbing a large part of high school graduates.

Elliott replied that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish public and private universities in the US, because "the public ones are less and less based on government resources, and more in annuities and private sponsorship and funding agencies". According to him, one of the reasons for this is the existing anxiety about the difficulties of students to have access to higher education due to the increase in the tuition price.

Jeffrey Lesser, a visiting professor at IEA, said that in his work as a historian and anthropologist he is increasingly working with computer scientists, and that the expansion of the public for the humanities also includes the expansion of the public that the researchers have to work with. He wondered how Elliott sees the future of this articulation of different publics within the university regarding the production of knowledge.

For Elliott, something peculiar of digital projects is that they tend to be more collaborative because they require more people and skills. Two outcomes are desirable in this dialogue, in his view: the increase of critical thinking, "not to be softened by humanists" and the multiplication of the number of projects from the dialogue between researchers from several areas.

Utilitarianism

Grossmann asked Elliott if the restriction of the resources for the humanities due to being more questioning is an international conservative movement or a reflex of a specific historical moment.

Enchanting the Desert: digital monograph by geographer Nicholas Bauch

Elliott disagreed. For him, the contraction of the humanities in the US is not the result of conservative policies: "These policies have existed for a long time. What has changed in higher education is that things with practical uses are considered more important and the humanities are seen as less useful".

"What I see is not a specific attack on the humanities, but a lack of funding to them, which are organized into smaller and more vulnerable departments when there are cuts in the resources."

According to him, it is the liberal [left-winged, in the American sense of the term] and not the conservatives who like to deride universities, criticizing concerns about political correctness and politicies of identity.

Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, a professor at UNICAMP and a member of the coordination of FAPESP’s Program for Research on e-science, commented that engineering researchers often say that humanists take too long to produce knowledge and that this increases the barrier between areas. She wanted to know from Elliott how this can be reduced and also how to deal with the diversity of funding policies for each area.

Elliott said that the cautious interpretation of the data is one of the things that define the humanities, but that digital publishing significantly reduces the time between the production of knowledge and access to it for all. On the issue of bureaucracy in funding, he said that it is a more difficult problem to solve and that the difficulty also exists in the US, with different protocols and analysis, even if carried out by the same department.

Asked by Abel Packer, coordinator of the SciELO-FAPESP Program, on the apparent difficulty of humanists to establish networks for the production of knowledge, unlike natural scientists, whose articles usually have a few pages and several authors, Elliott said that the issue of networking in the US has to do with how scholars in the humanities are trained, so digital publication will not solve it. "The expectation is that the graduate student sets a topic of independent research from the beginning. This independence is a cultural value of the humanities. The researcher is assessed in terms of their preparation to act independently in their area. On the other hand, natural scientists work in a laboratory with a staff from the start".

Michael Elliott, Jeffrey Lesser and Martin Grossmann

Professionals and amateurs

Luis Ferla, from UNIFESP, asked Elliot on peer review in digital edition and commented on the issue of aura cited by him, "an ironic paradox, because at a time when our social role is being questioned the solution can be losing our aura. In the digital world, the barrier between producers and consumers is disappearing and we are becoming similar to amateurs".

For Elliott, not all editorial experience will work in digital media. "There will be failures and we have to accept it. I also have some concerns about the loss of knowledge when we enter the digital world, where an academic work can stand side by side with something done without the desirable professionalism". Moreover, he believes that there will still be works of interest to academics in the field only.

"We are entering an era in which academics will work in many different things. This will change the way how we do our work and train our students, and it will create both risks and rewards".

Regarding peer review, he said that the university presses will continue to demand such an assessment for digital projects. "And one should be careful with what is put in digital circulation, because there is no longer the private environment of the academic world. Any student can immediately send something that was just published to the whole world by phone ".

Photos: Leonor Calasans/IEA-USP

The novelty of integrating an interdisciplinary activity in which a series of conferences and discussions should lead to the production of a concrete product was one of the main challenges of the Intercontinental Academia, according to the interactions of the participants in the evaluation panel of the project's second phase in Nagoya, on March 11.

The need to get used to 13 different academic languages, corresponding to the areas of expertise of the participants, has also been highlighted. However, the challenges are not obstacles to the gains that the project will offer, according to the researchers. Some of them said they have benefited from participating in the Intercontinental Academia since they have adopted a new approach with their students, seeking to incorporate the views of other areas to usual and new problems of their disciplines.

The general expectation is that the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on "Time" and the documentary on the project let students, researchers and institutions intereseted in organizing and participating in similar interdisciplinary activities.

Several suggestions for the improvement of future editions of the Intercontinental Academia have been presented: the importance of achieving a greater balance of gender, areas of expertise and cultural representation, and the organization of joint activities for participants and senior researchers.

Eduardo Almeida, a professor at USP, said that the big issues, such as time, are very important for discussions and experiments like the Intercontinental Academia. "It is good to be relatively young, but when we are in our 30s we are a bit matured and end up losing the link with these major issues."

He also pointed out the convenience of a group of people with eclectic education and able to build bridges between them. Almeida believes that the philosophers are the best ones to play this role. He said he learned this in practice thanks to the interaction with the representative of the University of Turku, Finnish philosopher Valtteri Arstila, and two other members "with philosophical inclinations": neuroscientist André Cravo Mascioli, from UFABC, and architect and art historian Nikki Moore, from Rice University.

Education

German oceanographer Marius Müller, a researcher in postdoctoral studies at USP, said that one of the results that he is already experiencing is to have started to deal with new issues with his students without leaving behind the view of other disciplines. Müller believes that the project stimulates thinking research as a process applicable to various fields, "something that natural scientists tend to forget given the emphasis on obtaining results in the academic world."

Biologist Norihito Nakamishi, from the Nagoya University, also said to have benefited in his teaching activities. "In my case, this is not a big increase for research, but it is a great contribution to my work as a professor."

Communication

Mathematician Adriano De Cezaro, from UFRGS, highlighted the communicational development of who takes part in such a project: "Here we have 13 different "languages" and to learn them is something extraordinary." Specialist in medieval narrative Eva von Contzen, from the Ruhr University of Bochum, also considers communication as one of the key ingredients of the Intercontinental Academia: "We learned to communicate with each other, to listen to other 'languages', not only from other disciplines, but also from other cultures."

What has let communication easier was the possibility of the researchers to spend a good time together, according to Arstila. For him, this has been the differential in relation to other interdisciplinary projects in which he participated and that have not been very successful.

Interdisciplinarity

Boris Roman Gibhardt, a researcher at the University of Bielefeld's Center for Interdisciplinary Research, said that the project's emphasis on interdisciplinarity is important but not enough. "We should have greater ambitions and concern ourselves with critical thinking, for example," he said. For him, the Intercontinental Academia is a great project, but not something that lasts: "In academic life there is not much interest in supporting interdisciplinarity, unless in specific projects. This is a problem. In the humanities, the disciplines were established in the early 19th century. We must question whether they are still updated. There will only be interdisciplinarity when disciplines are dissolved."

Interdisciplinarity is a challenge, but its perspective is important for researchers and students, according to Kazuhisa Takeda, from Waseda University, one of the project's supporters. He said he shared the experience of participating in the São Paulo workshop with his students and noticed how this approach is attractive to young people. "Maybe the young researchers will be able to continue this approach and attract new students to it in the future."

Academic reflections

Mediator of the panel, von Contzen said that the project presented two common problems in academic life: the disproportion between genders in the group with only two women among the 13 participants, and the tiering among researchers: juniors (participants) and seniors (coordinators and speakers).

Mascioli added two further aspects that have emulated the academic routine: many workshops instead of more time to work and the need for a final product. "But here we have the freedom to question these things, which does not happen in academia and in other experiences that I took part in."

MOOC

On the other hand, Mascioli considers it important that the project has the production of a MOOC as practical activity, for "doing an introductory course is good in order to bring the discourse to an understandable level to everyone." Arstila also enhanced the production of the course as a way to create a commitment between the participants."

Helder Nakaya, from USP, said he supported the MOOC from the beginning, "not because it is something new, but because it is something modern and a good way to communicate, as well as a great exercise." Moreover, he believes that society deserves to have access to such a product in exchange of the "investment to be in extraordinary places with extraordinary people." He believes that the MOOC can encourage many young people to try to attend university.

Three other possible changes have been suggested during the panel: Moore proposed that in future editions each participant should have the opportunity to present a paper at the beginning, for everyone to know them better and for them to be questioned by senior researchers; Arstila said that perhaps the work would be more productive if the number of involved disciplines were minor; Nakaya suggested that the speakers are asked to make more accessible presentations to all researchers in all areas.

Comments

At the end of the panel, the interventions of the participants were commented by Till Roenneberg, Eliezer Rabinovici and Martin Grossmann, members of the Senior Committee, and by Carsten Dose, general secretary of the project.

Roenneberg expressed his admiration for the commitment of the participants and agreed that during the immersions in São Paulo and Nagoya, given the need to build the scientific background (workshops and conferences) for the production of the MOOC, there was little time left to work directly for the outcome. The difficulty, he said, is how to get time to do this work at the same time as the participants return to their normal academic activities.

The merit of the project, according to Rabinovici, has been to provide the participants with knowledge of quality and the possibility of creating a network. "I do not know how much the created links are strong and durable, but the possibility of them lasting a few years is valuable. The project to be developed (MOOC) may succeed or not, but it will work as a test for the participants."

He considered the gender imbalance a major problem to be solved in the future, but stressed how the process of selection of participants was hard. He admitted, however, that there could have been made additional efforts to more women to sign up."

Dose reported that the feedback from the participants of this first edition of the Intercontinental Academia and the first phase (in Jerusalem) of the ongoing second edition (on human dignity) will be an important part of the discussion at the UBIAS directors' meeting next June at the University of Birmingham.

Theme

He considered it curious that the participants have discussed almost every aspect of the project but the central theme: time. For him, this shows that the theme was an appropriate intellectual challenge to work with.

Dose wanted to know what alternative theme could have been chosen; something that considered one of the great problems of society, as some of the participants commented. He also asked about another outcome of the project: some of the participants wanted to create a website together, accessible to a wide audience.

De Cezaro said that few issues are as comprehensive as time. For him, discussing time in specific societies would be more appropriate, however, restrictive. Regarding the usefulness to society, he said it occurs in the form of pure knowledge.

Part of the group aims to develop a parallel project, according to von Contzen, who cited the established connections: "The idea is to make a website that functions as a platform for publishing content in various formats, including academia and art, addressing a different topic on each update, and produced by people linked to the UBIAS."

Grossmann said that since the beginning of the planning of the project, the idea was to invest in risk and that the only concern with regard to the selection of the 13 participants was the quality of their work. The challenge now, he said, is the continuation of the cooperation network between researchers. In this regard, "the creation of a joint website is great news."

Critical thinking

Grossmann asked Gibhardt to talk more about his advocacy of greater concern to produce critical thinking. The representative of the University of Bielefeld said that this is a special issue for the humanities: "They can contribute to the future of academia particularly through critical thinking. We should be more intellectual and try to develop ideas in different contexts, such as the political and the social ones. The development of the right ideas, and at the right places and the right times, would be more important than developing a MOOC, a book or something similar. My idea has to do with education, which is not a specific product. It is invisible. This is idealism, I know, but I think it is a matter of attitude."

Political scientist, philosopher and diplomat Sérgio Paulo Rouanet, former National Secretary of Culture and author of the cultural incentive law that bears his name, will give the inaugural conference of the Olavo Setubal Chair of Arts, Culture and Science, of which he is the first holder.

Rouanet will address the influence of modernity in the economic, political and cultural contexts through the ideas of sociologists Max Weber and Manuel Castells, and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Modernity and its Ambivalences will take place on May 17, at 10 am, in the former University Board Room.

The debaters will be jurist Celso Lafer, former Minister of Foreign Affairs; philosopher Renato Janine Ribeiro, former Minister of Education and coordinator of the IEA's Research Group The Future Inquires Us; and sociologist Barbara Freitag, professor emeritus from the University of Brasília (UnB). The opening of the seminar will be attended by the president of USP, Marco Antonio Zago, by the director of the IEA, Paulo Saldiva, and by Eduardo Saron, director at the Itaú Cultural Institute.

A project of the IEA in partnership with the Itaú Cultural Institute, the Olavo Setubal Chair will be a space to discuss and promote activities related to the world of arts, with special focus on cultural management. Its goal is to foster interdisciplinary reflections on academic, artistic, cultural and social issues of regional and global scope.

The concept of modernity

According to Rouanet there are still doubts about the concept of modernity even though it is being discussed more than ever before. One of the definitions has been presented by sociologist Anthony Giddens: "Modernity refers to the ways of life and the social organization that emerged in Europe from the 18th century, and subsequently became global in their influence."

However, Rouanet believes that "if we want to give a concrete content to this mature chronological frame, we should go back to the classical analyzes of Max Weber," for whom modernity is the product of cumulative rationalization processes that occurred:

• economically – free mobility of production factors, wage labor, rational techniques of accounting and management, and continual incorporation of science and technology to the production process;
• politically – replacement of the decentralized feudal state by the centralized national state;
• culturally – secularization of traditional worldviews (Entzauberung) and their internal division into value spheres (Wertsphären): science, morality, law and art.
  

Rouanet seeks to integrate these Weberian categories in the context of Habermas's theory of communicative action. As a case study, he proposes the analysis of more abstract questions about books and their future prospects in the face of new technologies of information and communication, taking advantage of Castells's approach.

Photo: Cecília Bastos/USP

The original motivations for the creation of institutes for advanced studies can be identified from the late 19th century, when discussions on the role of universities started questioning whether they should be primarily devoted to research and knowledge advancement or mainly to the spread of knowledge through education and the development of technological applications.

The first proposal in support of a distinguished research institution, similar to what would become the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton Univesity (IAS), was brought up exactly a hundred years ago in the book The Higher Learning in America, by sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), according to Peter Goddard, former director of the IAS. He gave the conference The Development of Institutes for Advanced Study and their Role in the Contemporary University on March 11 during the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia's first edition, in Nagoya.

The subtitle of Veblen's book is The Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, a reference to the replacement of clerics by businessmen in the governance of American universities during the 19th century. According to Goddard, Veblen believed that this change led to the introduction of standardization systems, accountability and payment for production, meaning the replacement of the academic ideal of a "mediocrity perfunctory routine."

The first institute for advanced studies

Educator Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), one of those responsible for the reform in the teaching of medicine and higher education in general in the United States has been the proponent of the creation of the first institute for advanced studies.

According to Goddard, Flexner was approached by Louis and Caroline Bamberger at the end of 1929. The couple had made a fortune with department stores and were searching for guidance to create a medical school. In a few months they were convinced by Flexner to sponsor the creation of the Princeton IAS, of which he became the founding director.

Goddard said that the essay The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge was written by Flexner to argue that advancements in the most practical value of knowledge do not come from research guided by goals, but from those motivated by intellectual curiosity. The best example of this attitude could not be another than the first hired person by Flexner in 1932: Albert Einstein.

In 1958 the then director of the IAS, Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), attributed the emergence of new institutes for advanced studies to the impacts of the increasing complexity of research and the expansion of higher education, since these two restricted the opportunities for scholars to devote themselves to intense intellectual issues, Goddard reported.

Present time

For Goddard, the institutes can offer a lot in relation to the challenges faced by universities in spite of consisting a relatively small part of academia.

Besides the impacts mentioned by Oppenheimer there are also the contemporary culture of auditing, managerialism, and institutional evaluation and analysis systems. This framework has increased the need for research environments where the short-term production of tangible results must not interfere with the fundamental research activity, Goddard said.

Within this context, institutes for advanced studies have been created by universities "as sanctuaries for eminent scholars to give them respite from the demands of the evaluation exercises, and as international standard frameworks", serving for the aspirations of universities to obtain such visibility.

Another important aspect highlighted by Goddard is that the institutes promote the intersection of research topics, allowing them to "establish scenarios to overcome the boundaries between disciplines, institutionalized within the administrative structures of universities since the 19th century and now often seen as inhibitors of scientific progress."

Goddard pointed out four main reasons for the emergence of institutes for advanced studies today:

• opportunities for academics to conduct research led by curiosity and distant from the intense pressures of the modern university;
• international environments within the increasingly international academia;
• success in terms of research output and impact on long-term development of the researchers who work in them;
• they are a benchmark of the universities' institutional and status aspirations.

According to Goddard, the typical characteristics of an institute for advanced studies are to focus on research rather than education, to work at the intersections of disciplines and to offer programs for visiting researchers. However, they differ in several ways, especially when it comes to:

• number of addressed subjects;
• level of constitutional independence (governance);
• level of financial independence;
• permanent researchers (or not);
• specific thematics and programs (or not).

Photo: IAR/Nagoya University

Deputy Sibá Machado, rapporteur of the project that gave rise to the Innovation Law

This is the Brazilian reality because "we are very poor in terms of patents," said Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), one of the exhibitors at the seminar The New Innovation Law: Expectations, Perspectives and Initiatives, held on April 4 at the USP's Faculty of Economics, Management and Accounting (FEA).

The poor performance in patents is an indicator of the country's difficulties in producing innovation, an activity surrounded by legal, institutional, financial and even cultural impediments.

"Brazil has 20% of the world's biodiversity but an archaic legislation on the issue. In the last 10 years we have only allowed 300 researches in this area. The result is that companies prefer to patent their products abroad." The example was given by Paulo Mól, national superintendent of the Euvaldo Lodi Institute (IEL) of the National Industry Confederation (CNI) and coordinator of the Business Mobilization for Innovation (MEI).

Legal advancement

While there is still much to be done, the spirit of the actors involved in science, technology and innovation in Brazil is renewed. This is a result of the new legal framework established for the sector in recent years.

Helena Nader: a perspective of the scientific community

The most recent achievement was the adoption of a constitutional amendment (Emenda Constitucional nº 85 - in Portuguese), amending and adding devices in the Federal Constitution to update the treatment of activities in science, technology and innovation. The amendment has led to the final law project presented by various members of the Parliament in 2011 and resulted in the new innovation law, enacted on January 11 by President Dilma Rousseff.

The new law provides for incentives to scientific development, research, scientific and technological capacity, and innovation. It also amends various legal provisions.

In addition to the law and the constitutional amendment, deputy Sibá Machado also addressed a set of legal texts from which science, technology and innovation benefit, and which deals with the supporting foundations; a law on the access to biodiversity; a provisional measure on the imports by supporting foundations; and a proposed constitutional amendment that regulates professional and graduation courses.

Vahan Agopyan, vice-president of USP, and Guilherme Ary Plonski (left) during the opening of the seminar

Machado was the rapporteur of the project that gave rise to the law. He said that the idea of establishing a National Code of Science, Technology and Innovation was dropped because something like that would head the standards to a relatively inflexible way, which would be inappropriate for an area in constant transformation.

One of the great achievements of the process that led to the new legislation was the fact that it is the result of consensus among the scientific community, companies, the Brazilian congress and the government (including the effort for the overthrow of vetoes), according to the speakers at the seminar.

At the opening of the seminar, Professor Guilherme Ary Plonski, organizer of the event and scientific coordinator of the USP's Center for Policy and Technology Management (PGT), said that the five-year work that resulted in the constitutional amendment and in the Innovation Law has involved 53 academic, entrepreneurial and government institutions, 19 of them taking a more active role.

Maria Paula Dallari Bucci: initiatives for effectiveness

USP's vice-president Vahan Agopyan cited the problem of legal uncertainty, which hinders many companies to invest in innovation. According to him, a 2010 survey indicated that only 0.25% of the companies in the State of São Paulo able to invest in innovation had the courage to use the Law of Innovation. FEA's deputy director, Joaquim José Martins Guilhoto, highlighted the national and regional impact of the new law. The opening of the seminar has also been attended by the University's provost for research, José Eduardo Krieger, who has moderated the seminar.

Regulation

According to the exhibitors, the immediate steps are the overthrow of the eight partial vetoes and the regulation of the new law, whose proposal will be drawn up by a working group of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), and submitted to public consultation.

The regulation will be a crucial stage in the process in order to resolve doubts and disagreements, and again try to reach a consensus. At the seminar, it was up to the USP's legal superintendent, Maria Paula Dallari Bucci, a professor at the University's Law School, to detail the legal aspects involved in the new legislation and the precautions to be taken in its implementation. Bucci took the point of view of the public sector, giving special attention to the peculiarities of the State of São Paulo.

Paulo Mól: perspective of the business community

For her, instead of talking about regulation, one must speak of "regulations for specific points." The first priority, she said, is to define a legal concept that gives support to the managing entity of technology parks and incubators. She recalled that the qualification of private law's legal entities as social organizations whose activities are directed to science, technology and innovation is allowed, but by law the government of the State of São Paulo is not. This prohibition places the future of many São Paulo institutions at risk, according to the professor.

Further topics that have been discussed: the need to set limits to the possibility of researchers in exclusive dedication to participate in paid private projects so that there is no prejudice to their teaching and research activities; the clarification of how the support of foundations can manage their own revenues from science and technology public institutions; and how to deal with the issue of reciprocity in the case of incentives for foreign companies to settle research and development centers in Brazil.

For Bucci, one amendment inserted by the new law is a setback: the repeal of the Innovation Law devices that dealt explicitly with consolidated information that should be annually passed on by the science and technology institutions to the MCTI (intellectual property policy, developed creations; required and granted protection, and licensing agreements or technology transfer signed).

The event has been a partnership between the USP's Dean of Research, the IEA, the USP's Center for Policy and Technology Management (PGT), based on FEA, and the Centre for Research Innovation and Competitiveness Observatory (NAP- OIC), based on the IEA.

Related material

Naoshi Sugiyama's conference — March 9, 2016

• The relativity of time

Two main issues were addressed at the final discussion of the Physics Workshop of the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), on March 9: the difference between the concept of time in physics and the perception of time by living organisms, and the invariable aspects of time in relativity.

Eliezer Rabinovici

For physicist Eliezer Rabinovici, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the ICA's Senior Committee, whoever speaks the physical-mathematical language clearly sees what it means to add time as an extra dimension and the implications of having four dimensions. "The time dimension has different characteristics, but can be called so as it is a mathematical term. But it becomes confusing to talk about the fourth dimension in ordinary language, so it is best not to use the expression."

Physicist Naoshi Sugiyama, associate director of the Nagoya University's Institute for Advanced Research (IAR), commented that dimensions are numbers required to specify the existence of something. As an analogy to the four dimensions of spacetime, he said that if someone needs to tell a friend how to find them, they will tell them the building address, the correct floor and the time when they will be there.

Naoshi Sugiyama

Taking part in the discussion on the perception of time and the time in physics, physicist Peter Goddard, a researcher and former director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, said that to relate everyday experiences with what happens beyond can be confusing: "As humans, we can not have the experience of special relativity, because we can not travel at the speed of light."

Another mistake, he said, is to claim that something exists independently of the observer. "In the Newtonian thinking structure, space and time were considered uniform. One can not include relativity in this structure. What does exist at any given time? The answer to that depends on the observer."

Chemist Hisanori Shinohara, Director of the IAR, recalled that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics predicts the increase of entropy in an isolated system and asked if time will still make sense when the entropy of the universe as a whole ceases to increase, with it reaching a perfect state balance and, consequently, dying.

Sugiyama said that one can not predict the temperature and the time of the universe if we think of an infinite future. Moreover, "if there is dark energy, the universe will expand forever and in that sense will never come to an end." On the other hand, "if there is no dark energy and the universe is flat, it will stop expanding at some point, but this will be in an infinite future."

Hisanori Shinohara

Rabinovici has also commented on the issue exposed by Shinohara. He said that, in fact, entropy increases permanently, but it depends on the analyzed system. According to him, even in the universe the existence of long periods of increasing entropy and other ones of decreasing entropy should be considered: "And in a time far, far away, the universe will again be what it once has been. But I say to young students that this kind of issue is very deep and it is best to leave it aside for now and concentrate on simpler ones."

Sugiyama said there is a famous analogy about the return of the universe to a previous condition: "A monkey hits the keys of a typewriter. If it does this for a long, long time, it will evolve to Shakespeatre by chance."

Anthropologist Naoki Nomura, from the Nagoya University, has also participated in the discussion. In his view, the idea of relativity does not belong only to the physics but is also a matter of epistemology. He has even questioned the consistency of the theory of relativity: "When it previews a single nature for time it stops being relative and becomes contradictory."

Naoki Nomura

When responding to the comments by Nomura, Rabinovici said that one of the dangers of this type of workshop "is the use of words because they mean different things to each person." He added that the term relativity was incorporated into the theory's name wrongly: "It is not a theory of relativity but a theory of invariance. In the process of searching for what is not relative, one discovers that many things considered invariable are actually not. Newton thought that some things were absolute, when they are actually relative. But not everything is relative. The order in time (something happening after another), this can not be negotiated. If two things are simultaneous while measuring time or not, this is negotiable, and it depends on certain factors."

Goddard also commented Nomura's statement: "The personal experience of time is one thing and the time in physics is another. The theory of relativity is consistent and has nothing to do with the subjective experience. It is very important to keep these separate."

Peter Goddard

Martin Grossmann, former director of the IEA and also a member of the ICA's Senior Committee, wondered whether Goddard finds it impossible to relate time in the way it is thought in physics with the way it is seen by social sciences and humanities.

Goddard said that it is not impossible, but that one has to be careful with the words, as Rabinovici said. In his opinion, the confusion in the use of terms of one area in another one are partly the fault of the physicists who "like to use figurative speech, because metaphors can be quite productive while doing science."

Valtteri Arstila, from the University of Turku, wanted to know the opinion of Goddard about a text on spacetime that has been published at the Stanford University's website. According to the text, the general theory of relativity makes the spacetime less relative than the one in special relativity: "The absolute space and time of Newton are kept. They are merely amalgamated and enriched with the most flexible mathematical skeleton."

Valtteri Arstila

Goddard did not agree with the statement by Stanford. For him, time does not cease to be relative in the general theory of relativity because there is a "symmetry between mass and geometry of spacetime, given that Einstein conceived the intensely related spacetime and matter."

Michael A. Elliott, a professor at Emory University

The way how humanists convey their research to audiences that are external to the university, and the implications of new technologies and communication patterns will be discussed at a conference followed by a workshop with Michael A. Elliott, a professor of literature and culture of the United States at Emory University.

The Humanities and their Publics will take place on April 19, from 10.00 am to 12.00 pm, in the IEA's Events Room. Elliott will address the American academics' view of their role in society since the beginning of the 20th century. The possibilities and risks of becoming a public intellectual in the digital age will also be under discussion.

The workshop Research Without Frontiers: The Future of Academic Publication in a Digital World, from 2.30 pm to 5.00 pm, will be exclusive to guests. A work developed by Elliot for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be used as a starting point for the activity. It is a project on how digital networks can change the academic monograph.

Both the conference and the workshop will be held in English and broadcast live on the web.

Jeffrey Lesser, currently a visiting professor at the IEA, will coordinate the activities.

Elliott specializes in the literature and culture of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to American cultures and the place of Native Americans in the United States.

He is the author of Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (2007) and The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (2002), and co-editor (with Claudia Stokes) of American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader (2003).

Photo: Emory University

10⁻¹⁸ of a second. With this degree of accuracy a clock would be only one second too early or too late over a period of 30 billion years, more than twice the age of the universe. This is the challenge of a new type of atomic clock in development since 2003: an optical lattice clock.

The cutting edge construction of this type of clock was presented by Masao Takamoto, a researcher at the Quantum Metrology Laboratory of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) during the Physics Workshop of the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), on March 9.

At the conference Precision Metrology with Optical Lattice Clocks, Takamoto said that atomic clocks are the reference for accurate measurements with 15 digits (10^-15 of a second) and emphasized their importance to infrastructure sectors as they allow a greater accuracy in services such as systems Global Positioning (GPS) and the synchronization of high speed networks. He added that they are also very important for measurements in physical experiments, such as precision spectroscopy in quantum physics.

The international standard of the second duration was defined in 1967 by cesium atomic clocks. The International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French name Temps Atomique International) is established by the average of such interconnected clocks. According to Takamoto, the best results in terms of accuracy so far have been obtained by cesium clocks of the SYRTE (Space-Time Reference System), in France, and of the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), in the USA, which reached 3 x 10^-16 of a second.

The search for an even greater precision and greater stability has motivated researchers to design optical atomic clocks. There are two types of them trying to occupy the role of reference in second measurement, according to Takamoto:

• a single-ion clock in an electric field with ability to achieve a precision of 10^-18 s (proposed by Hans Dehmelt in 1982);
• an optical lattice clock, in which the potential of the optical lattice captures about 1 million atoms in separated "traps". It is able to achieve a precision of 10^-18 s and its stability is provided by the simulation of 1 million single-ion clocks in parallel (proposed by Hidetoshi Katori in 2001).

The RIKEN and the Katori Laboratory of the University of Tokyo's School of Engineering have developed optical lattice clocks. Takamoto is the first researcher and assistant director for research of the laboratory.

The first demonstration of an optical lattice clock took place in 2003. In 2005 one of them had its absolute frequency measured. In 2006 the frequency measurement was made by three groups:. SYRTE, JILA (USA) and the National Metrology Institute of Japan. From these results, a new definition for the second has been proposed, Takamoto said.

In 2008-2009 experiments were carried out to measure the absolute frequency of the strontium optical lattice clock using optical fiber between Tokyo and Tsukuba (an actual distance of 50 km that required 120 km of optical fiber). "This and other international experiments have shown an excellent agreement between the clocks with a degree of accuracy close to 6 x 10^-16 s," according to Takamoto.

In September 2006 the Consultative Committee for Time and Frequency (CCTF) adopted four types of optical clocks as "secondary representations of the second," according to the researcher: the strontium optical lattice clock and the single-ion clocks of strontium, mercury and ytterbium.

The Time and Frequency Department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures - BIPM), which is responsible for the TAI, will discuss criteria for the redefinition of the second in the next 5 to 10 years, Takamoto said. Atomic clocks to serve as a reference shall:

• be fully described and have advanced research available on them;
• be developed by various groups and laboratories;
• be marketed (preferably).

The chemical element and the clock scheme will be chosen from the performance of the various existing types. However, after the second is redefined by a clock with a precision of 10^-18 s it will be necessary to find a way to share time with 18 digits under the influence of the Earth's gravitational potential: "According to theory of general relativity, time goes faster on higher ground. The height difference of 1 cm makes a difference between two clocks with a precision of 10^-18 s. This is a problem from the point of view of a standard establishment."

Among the applications that this type of clock with extreme precision will allow, Takamoto cited:

• the production of precise proof for the gravitational potential by using the Theory of General Relativity;
• the demonstration of relativistic geodesy by comparing clocks connected by very long optical fiber;
• the geopotential mapping for the search for mineral resources;
• the monitoring of the variation in the gravitational potential time due to tidal effects;
• the detection of the Earth's crust movements and of volcanic activity.

For measuring the gravitational potential, research aims at the development of transportable clocks with stable long-term operation and clocks with hollow core photonic crystal fiber.

Physicist Tadashi Takanayagi, from the Kyoto University's Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), said that a good analysis model for these conceptions are black holes, a metaphor for the analyses of 3D-realities from the observable information on 2D-surfaces, with the help of the Holographic Principle. The professor spoke during the Physics Workshop of the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), on March 9.

Theoretical physicist Tadashi Takanayagi

He explained that the Standard Model, a traditional approach of particle physics, works perfectly for three forces of matter: electromagnetism, strong interaction (nuclear power) and weak interaction (beta decay, neutrino). But it does not describe the action of the fourth force (gravity). "In the microscopic field, gravity behaves completely different from the other three forces."

This difficulty led to the String Theory, according to Takayanagi. As the strings rapidly vibrate, they give rise to heavy particles. As they vibrate slowly, they produce light particles. "With this approach, the theories on matter are consistent with the unification of the four forces: the open string describes electromagnetism, and the strong and weak interactions; simultaneously, the same string describes gravity when closed."

To check whether the String Theory is true, it is necessary to find a phenomenon that can only be explained by it, Takanayagi said. Some aspects of black holes are good cases for research, especially from the microscopic point of view: "We want to use a theoretical microscope to enlarge a black hole and see what is inside."

He said that this concern eventually resulted in the development of the Holographic Principle, "one of the most important advances in this theoretical field in the last 20 years."

The concept of spacetime is defined by a four-dimensional coordinate system (x, y, and z for space, and t for time). The Einstein's General Theory of Relativity considers this concept. "The question is whether this description system of spacetime is real and if it is the best framework for understanding the universe."

Perhaps the analysis of very microscopic structures indicates that space is emerging, and maybe even time is emerging, warns Takanayagi. For him, this kind of consideration leads to the idea that spacetime is equivalent to the information of matter.

Once that massive objects form a black hole, the information in it is not accessible to outsiders. The amount of non-accessible information is called entropy, explains the physicist, adding that the String Theory can solve the problem by playing the role of a microscope to extract information from the black hole. "Among the massive particles there are open strings and one can extract their behavior information. This makes it possible to explain the entropy of the black hole."

Takayanagi showed the formula that defines the amount of entropy of a black hole, proposed by Jacob Bekenstein and Steven Hawking, and stressed that one of its terms, represented by the letter A, corresponds to the surface area of the black hole.

"This is not common. If we observe any matter agglomerate (gas, liquid or solid), entropy is proportional to the volume, not to the surface. But the information seems to be on the surface of a black hole. This is similar to what happens in an hologram, where a 3D-image is encoded on a 2D-surface, but the mechanism is totally different, just an analogy. "

Takayanagi said that physicists Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind have conjectured that the gravitational theories are equivalent to microscopic theories of "a certain matter" on its border.

According to him, this idea is quite popular and intuitive, but the String Theory proposes something beyond that. He commented that in 1997 Juan Maldacena proposed that the Holographic Principle must be understood as a Gauge / Gravity Duality in the String Theory, meaning that there is an equivalence between gravity (closed strings) and matter (open strings).

At the same time, the Holographic Principle states that spaces can emerge from matter in gravity. Gravity would function as a series of sieves with different frame sizes, allowing the passage of information according to the granulation accepted by each sieve, said Takanayagi.

Toy model

He said that physicists use a toy model to express the hidden information in a black hole: a white dot or a black dot (similar to 0 or 1 in computers). The information unit based on these dots (or "coins") is called one qubit.

For the whole system it must be considered that possibly both the white dot and the black dot are inside and outside the black hole, with a 50% probability for each occurrence. "It follows that if within the black hole there is a white dot then out of it there will always be a white dot (and vice versa). If we can not look inside the black hole, then we can not know the outside of it (hidden information, for example)."

This phenomenon is called quantum entanglement and it is said that "the interior and the exterior are entangled." The amount of "coins" (or qubits) is called entropy of the entanglement (Sent), which measures the amount of hidden information.

Thanks to holography, it appears that the entropy of the black hole is equal to the entropy of the entanglement. In fact, Takanayagi adds, the entropy of the entanglement is equal to the area of any surface, even without any black hole. The formula that Takanayagi proposed with Shinsei Ryu in 2006 implies that spacetime consists of qubits of information.

The Holographic Principle states that the spaces in gravity emerge from matter (or information). In the String Theory, the holography allows us to say that the gravity in the 3D-universe is equal to the matter in the 2D- spacetime. In the gravity of the 3D-Universe spacetime can expand, contract and even be created. Considering the matter in the 2D-spacetime, spacetime is not dynamic, but matter can change and be created.

Deputy Sibá Machado, rapporteur of the project that gave rise to the Innovation Law

The seminar will examine the main aspects of the new law, exploring the perspectives of the main drivers for innovation and outlining the actions that should be undertaken to make the law to become effective.

The central exhibition will be made by deputy Sibá Machado, rapporteur of the project that gave rise to the law. The meeting will be opened by the FEA's director, Adalberto Américo Fischmann, and will feature the following speakers:

• José Eduardo Krieger, provost for research at the USP (institutional view);
• Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) (perspective of the scientific community);
• Paulo Mol, national superintendent of the Euvaldo Lodi Institute (IEL) of the National Industry Confederation (CNI) and coordinator of the Business Mobilization for Innovation (MEI) (perspective of the business community);
• Maria Paula Dallari Bucci, legal superintendent of the USP (initiatives for effectiveness).

Advancements

Just over a year the Boards of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate promulgated a constitutional amendment (Emenda Constitucional nº 85 - in Portuguese), amending and adding devices in the Federal Constitution to update the treatment of activities in science, technology and innovation. The amendment has lead to the final law project presented by various members of the Parliament in 2011 and resulted in the new innovation law, enacted on January 11 by President Dilma Rousseff.

The new law provides for incentives to scientific development, research, innovation, and scientific and technological capacity. It also amends several existing legal provisions, in particular Law No. 10.973 / 2004, known as the Innovation Law.

According to Professor Guilherme Ary Plonski, organizer of the seminar, these advancements in legislation are the result of a "laborious and tense" construction, to which numerous academic, business and government institutions have devoted their efforts over five years. He considers "particularly auspicious the fact that this work has made it to term even in this delicate national context."

The event is a partnership between the USP's Dean of Research, the IEA, the USP's Center for Policy and Technology Management (PGT), based on FEA, and the Centre for Research Innovation and Competitiveness Observatory (NAP- OIC), based on the IEA.

Photo: Gustavo Lima/Chamber of Deputies

Sasaki said that the formation of the Earth and the Moon, 4.5 billion years ago, and the influence of the Moon on the planet are the determinants of the length variation of a day and a month throughout the Earth's history.

Planetary scientist Takanori Sasaki

According to him, the most accepted hypothesis to explain the origin of the Moon is the occurrence of a giant impact between a Mars-sized body and what could be called the proto-Earth.

But when did this impact occur exactly? Sasaki explained that to have this question answered researchers analyze the transformation of the isotope hafnium-182 into the isotope tungsten-182. "Hafnium is a lithophile (rock-loving) element and tungsten is a siderophile (iron-loving) element, respectively connected to the mantle and the core of a star.

According to Sasaki, the giant impact has produced a magma ocean on the proto-Earth, which seems to have lead to a considerable separation between metal and silicates. Thus, the age of the hafnium-tungsten (Hf-W) separation would be the age of the last huge impact, that is, the age of the Earth and the Moon. "It is possible to calculate how much tungsten the mantle has and thus determine the age of the planet." Using this method, it has been concluded that the Earth and the Moon emerged at the beginning of the solar system, 62 million years after the system's rise, 4.5 billion years ago.

The impact has generated a large number of fragments around the Earth, which then regrouped giving rise to the Moon at an orbit just above the Roche limit (minimum distance from the center of the planet that a satellite can orbit without being destroyed by the severity of the tidal forces), said Sasaki. This limit is at a distance of three times the Earth's radius, but now the Moon is at a distance of 60 times the radius size, and should stop to move away when the distance reaches 80 times the radius size, in a multibillion years.

To measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon scientists use time: how long it takes for a laser beam to reach the Moon, be reflected and reach the Earth. The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment uses this method and the first measurement was made in 1969. With this method, it was decided that the Moon is at 384,400 km from the Earth. Then, the Experiment found a surprising fact: analyzing the data from January 1992 to April 2001, the researchers found that the Moon is moving away 3.8 cm per year. "If this is correct, then the Moon was much closer in the past," Sasaki said.

There is an exchange of angular momentum between the Moon and the Earth. Sasaki cited a hypothesis that is mentioned in the reference book of this area, "Solar System Dynamics," by Carl Murray and Stanley Dermott: "It is highly likely that the orbit of the Moon and the Earth's rotation have considerably changed during the existence of the solar system, especially due to the action of semidiurnal tides [when the Moon is over a location on the Earth and then on its opposite side] caused by the Moon to the Earth."

This means that the Moon attracts the mass of water and this reduces the speed of the Earth's rotation. At the same time, the tide shifting due to the Earth's rotation attracts the Moon, gaining angular momentum and gradually distancing. The Moon also gets slower, reducing the duration of the month.

Sasaki explained that according to the Kepler's 3rd Law (the square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of half the major axis of its orbit), the closer to the Sun, the higher the speed of a planet, and the further away, the slower. This also applies to the Moon-Earth system.

An attempt to prove the variation in month length has been made by two researchers that studied the structure of a certain type of sea shell. For Sasaki, "this is a controversial article, but it provides some interesting directions." The shells develop lines of daily growth in segments with monthly growth. Analyzing shells today, it appears that they have 30 rows per segment, which means a 30-day month. "In fossil shells of 400 million years ago there are only 9 lines per segment, assuming that the month lasted 9 days. This indicates that the Moon spun faster around the Earth and at a distance 40% smaller than the current one."

After all, how long did a day last when the Earth and the Moon came to be? "At first, the Moon was at a distance of three times the Earth's radius, immediately after the Roche limit. With this distance and the estimated angular momentum, it can be said that the day lasted only 4 hours. Over time, the Moon moved away and the length of the day increased: when the planet and its satellite were 30,000 years old, the day lasted six hours; when they were 60 million years old, the day lasted 10 hours."

At the end of his presentation, Sasaki presented a graph relating the development of life ("though not an expert on the issue") with the length of the day through time. According to it, the first evidence of life, 3.5 billion years ago, happened when the day lasted 12 hours. The emergence of photosynthesis, 2.5 billion years ago, happened when the day lasted 18 hours. 1.7 billion years ago the day was 21 hours long and the eukaryotic cells emerged. The multicellular life began when the day lasted 23 hours, 1.2 billion years ago. The first human ancestors arose 4 million years ago, when the day was already very close to 24 hours long.

Naoshi Sugiyama, a physicist from the Nagoya University, spoke about time according to the Einstein's special and general theories of relativity on March 9, at the Physics Workshop of the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), in Nagoya.

Sugiyama's approach has been didactic and simplified for a proper understanding of the audience, with several participants from the humanities and the social sciences.

He explained that the special theory of relativity (1905) is based on two principles:

• Principle of Relativity, which states that all inertial frames of reference (moving at a constant speed) are equal;
• Principle of Invariant Light Speed, which is the same for all inertial frames of reference.

According to him, the understanding of these principles makes it easy to understand why time is relative and not absolute, as considered before Einstein's theories, which he quoted: "If the observer is still, the clock of a moving system beats more slowly." This is called dilution, Sugiyama said.

He added that in the General Theory of Relativity (1915) Einstein included the effect of gravity in the theory ("with the presence of strong gravity, time is also retarded") and established the equivalence principle, in which gravity and inertial strength can not be distinguished.

Regarding practical life, Sugiyama demonstrated how this dilution of time needs to be considered in the operation of a Global Positioning System (GPS). "It takes at least four satellites to determine x, y, z and t (the three spatial dimensions and time), and to calculate the distance from them by means of very precise measuring of time."

This precision is important because as the speed of light is 300,000 km / s if there is an error of a second the determined location will be at a distance of 300,000 km from where it actually is.

For the location to be identified with a margin of error of 10 cm, time needs to be measured with a maximum tolerance of 3/10 of a billionth of a second.

The effect of dilution by relativity implies the identification of spots on the Earth's surface outside their actual location: "In the case of special relativity, as satellites travel at high speed (4 km / s), the estimated location gets 25 cm away from the actual position at each second. In the case of general relativity, as gravity at 20,000 km high is weaker than that on the Earth's surface, the difference between the assumed location and the actual one is 160 cm."

To be precise, the GPS has to deal with the dilution of time caused by the satellite's speed and the weak gravity at the height of its orbit, said Sugiyama.

Scientific research and technological development in Japan should be guided by the social use of knowledge, innovation and cooperation between scientists, institutions and countries. The recommendation has been given by the president of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Michinari Hamaguchi.

His was the final exhibition of the first day (March 7) of conferences at the second phase of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA), in Nagoya. The theme of his speech was Higher Education and Academic Research From the View Point of Funding.

Hamaguchi said that humanity must face the depletion of natural resources, the food crisis, the global warming, the environmental degradation and the population growth. According to him, these challenges can not be solved separately by institutions, sectors of research or even by a specific country.

To this scenario he adds the changes in life and society resulting from rapid technological development, such as information and communication technologies: "We live in a totally different world than 30 years ago. Jobs are disappearing and more and more people consider that we live in a false industrial revolution, being ours a critical time indeed."

Concerning the Japanese context, Hamaguchi said that there is an additional social component: the aging of the population due to increased longevity and low birth rate.

Science for society

He recalled that in the Declaration on Science and the use of scientific knowledge, drawn up at a world conference organized by Unesco and the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Budapest, in 1999, the role of science was defined based on four objectives:

• science for knowledge, knowledge for progress;
• science for peace;
• science for development;
• science in society and science for society.

Tragedy

Regarding the contribution of science to society, Hamaguchi highlighted the urgency of efforts in Japan to overcome the consequences of the earthquake followed by a tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, when more than 18,000 people died: "How can we contribute through scientific and technological development so that the survivors rebuild their lives and regain their joy?".

The tragedy had also a profound impact on the credibility of Japanese scientists. Before the tsunami, almost 80% of the Japanese trusted the scientists, but this percentage dropped to 40% after the tragedy, now reaching 60%.

Japan must prepare for similar events. Most importantly, he said, is to seek solutions to issues as infrastructure, education, urban areas, nourishment and communication networks.

According to Hamaguchi, the JST's actions support the communities affected by the tsunami and the radioactive leak in Fukushima. One of the cited examples has been the development of an equipment to quickly verify if the rice being produced in the region is or not contaminated by radiation.

Universities

The speaker stressed that the technological revolution, besides deeply affecting the industry, employability and various aspects of the society's life, also leads to drastic changes in the university and the production of knowledge.

For him, the traditional forms of education will no longer function as a means of transmitting knowledge to new generations, and professors are losing their special role in society and may become ordinary citizens in a network. Therefore, Hamaguchi considers essential that Japan creates a new academic system and a new way of setting up university networks based on cooperative work.

JST programs

Hamaguchi said that the main programs of the JST for research funding are designed to stimulate innovation, including those related to basic research. One of the concerns is to support the intellectual property and train professionals working in the interaction between companies and academia.

According to him, the main program focused on innovation considers three assumptions: an aging population, an intelligent society and sustainability. The initiative has three development guidelines: 1) "backcast approach": to imagine a future society and what needs it will have in 10 to 20 years, and to plan the steps to be taken so that the objectives are achieved; 2) "under the same roof": to put together researchers from industry and from universities to harmonize their differences in performance, such as the time dedicated to a long-term research, for example; 3) a longer period of funding: the JST funds projects for 9 years, something unusual in Japan, where the projects are usually supported for 3 to 5 years.

Changes

After the conference, Hamaguchi answered some questions from the audience. Carsten Dose, executive director of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and General Secretary for the ICA, asked about the expectations in relation to changes in Japanese universities for them to become better in terms of innovation, given Hamaguchi's experience as president of the Nagoya University from 2009 to 2015. He said that Japan needs to change the style of doing science, paying greater attention to the needs of society.

In his view, another important aspect to demand changes is the fact that Japan has 2018 undergraduate programs and is facing the problem of reducing the Japanese population. One indicator of this gap is the reduction in competition in entrance exams at universities this year, he said. "The 18 year-old generation is decreasing rapidly. By 2025, Japan will be reduced by 103,000 (10%) in the number of people at that age. Currently, this population represents less than 60% from what it was in the peak period. This means that the system will collapse."

He added that there are 760 universities in Japan and 40% of them have problems. "We expect a kind of disaster in a few years. So we need to figure out how to reform higher education, but at the moment no one knows how to do this."

Martin Grossmann, former director of the IEA-USP and member of the Senior Committee for the ICA, wanted to know if there is a crisis of the social sciences and humanities in Japanese universities, since the news have been reporting that the country's institutions will give less attention to them.

Hamaguchi said that, the important is to incorporate social scientists from the beginning of projects related to the natural sciences and also to harmonize the styles of both fields: "The social sciences generally work with long periods of the past and Japan needs to think about the future. In addition, natural scientists work in groups, while social science research is often carried out by a single researcher."