2. The Smooth, Expanding Universe - Sean Carroll - Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe

As promised, this lecture begins the observation stage of the cycle. What do we see around us? The history of discovering the universe to be a large space expanding between galaxies (explained in the next lecture), thereby making more distant galaxies appear to be moving away faster, yet all being smoothly distributed, is all well put by Sean.

All that is, except for a somewhat desperate and comedic reference to dog years. This was in order to convert the age of the universe from 14 billion human years into 100 billion dog years, thereby equaling with the 100 billion stars in a typical galaxy, and the 100 billion galaxies in the universe. A bit of a stretch to say the least, but understandable in order to help a beginner.

The typical comparisons to the expanding universe as spots on a balloon and raisins in baking bread are all dissed. Sean gives appropriate enough reasons, but then turns around and use dog years? Plus these are both the demos used by Alex Filippenko, so maybe he is separating himself from his competitor?

An interesting setup for the next lecture is how Einstein's Theories predicted the expanding universe in 1915, yet when Hubble actually observed that happening in 1929, he did not present it as confirmation of Einstein, but as discovering recession velocity was proportional to distance.

I like the way concepts are being presented by Sean. It's accessible, appropriately paced, and does justice to the wonder of it all. Instead of making one want to walk away from the learned astronomer to gaze quietly at the stars before it's over (though one should certainly do that after viewing the entire lecture), the half hour goes by all too quickly to even think of it.

This lecture is going to be a fun one! We're going to go outside and we're going to look at the universe, virtually anyway. Viewers will stay inside and look at this DVD, Sean hopes! Yet we're going to take a look at what the universe looks like on the largest scales, and we're going to get good news. The universe looks pretty much the same everywhere. It's a dramatic, simplifying feature that our observable universe seems to have. So in fact, this lecture is going to cover a lot of ground. This would be a perfectly good course all by itself, this lecture, but the good news is that there's pretty pictures involved, so it's going to be a picturesque view of what the universe is made of, as far as what we can see.

Then in later lectures, we're going to take the evidence from what we see, and plug it into our theoretical notions to try to derive notions of what it actually is made of. So even though the universe looks the same everywhere, there is one thing that makes it not quite that simple, which is that it's getting bigger as a function of time. What that means is that different objects in the universe used to be closer together, and in the future they'll be further away. So we'll tell the story of how this was discovered and in the next lecture, what it all means in a deep down level.

It's very often that you'll hear people trying to explain to you the concept of the expanding universe by appealing to really bad analogies. So as a professional cosmologist, this gets Sean's dander up a little bit, when people use these analogies with the best of intentions to explain the idea of the expanding universe.

For example, they will have a balloon, put little dots on it, and blow it up. As it gets bigger, you see the dots moving away from each other. Then they go, "Aha, the dots moving away from each other, are just like galaxies moving away from each other in the expanding universe." That's correct in a sense, but you have to admit that when you see the balloon expanding, there's an inside to the balloon and an outside. Yet our universe is not like that! So the balloon analogy only really works if you look at the dots on the balloon and then imagine there is no such thing as the inside or outside of the balloon. It's possible to make that leap of imagination, but it's harder than just understanding what's going on in the first place.

Similarly, the other analogy that is very famously used is raisin bread. You start with a lump of raisin bread dough, with raisins inside. You put it in the oven and the dough expands, as perhaps you know. The raisins move away from each other and you say, "There you go, it's like the expanding universe!"

Yet again, you get a misconception from this analogy. That's because the raisin bread has an edge, a crust. It's also moving into something when it expands inside your oven. The universe, as far as we know, is all there is. When we say its expanding, it's not getting bigger into some preexisting space. What we mean is that the individual objects inside the universe are getting further apart.

Now how is that possible? How can you have the individual objects in the universe get further apart, even though it's not expanding into anything? That will be discussed in the next lecture when we explain how Einstein's General Theory of Relativity allows the space in between the objects to grow. Space-time itself is dynamical and can expand.

So Sean will not use any analogies whatsoever, and thinks the best way of understanding the expanding universe is to actually visualize the universe, the actual universe that we're in. Once you start conceptualizing it into some object inside something else, you get a false impression. As far as we know, our universe is all there is. There might be something outside, but we don't need to appeal to anything outside to understand what's going on. So lets just think about the universe.

Let's think of going outside, standing outside on a clear night where there are no clouds, and looking at the night sky. Furthermore, lets imagine you have perfect vision, so what that means is not only can you see things that are very faint and small, but also in all the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. In other words, you can see visible light, radio waves, and x-rays. We have perfect vision while standing outside looking at the universe. So what do we see?

Well there are some things that are obvious. You see the sun and the moon, which are fairly nearby as far as cosmology is concerned. You also see stars, and planets orbiting around the sun. These are all well and good, but the thing we'll focus on if we were standing outside on a clear night, is something called the Milky Way. This is a band of what looks like a cloud of milky whiteness, stretching from one edge of the horizon to the other edge, overhead. If you are able to look closely enough at it, you realize that this thing which looks like a cloud, is in fact made of stars.

The Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, and we can look at it better in the real world. We can have a satellite, so in fact NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, took an image of the Milky Way which we see on screen. It looks like a picture of a galaxy you would see, taken by any other telescope. It looks like it's taken from the outside, yet we really live inside the Milky Way.

The trick is that it's a disk. So you imagine a disk of stars, all orbiting around each other, and we're located near one edge. So when we look inside, we see the center of the Milky Way as a concentration of stars, fewer in the opposite direction, less stars in other directions, and very few at the poles. We're embedded in a plate shaped collection of stars, and that is what we call the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Milky Way has about 100 billion stars in it. We don't know the exact number, and some stars are too faint for us to see, but 100 billion is a good order of magnitude estimate. Any such collection of stars, is called a galaxy. The important point here is that these stars are not fixed, sitting there in space, they are orbiting each other. So there's a pull, due to gravity from one star to every other star, so that this entire collection of 100 billion stars is orbiting under their mutual gravitational field.

So we could ask if that was the entire universe? Would it be possible to imagine a universe in which we had the Milky Way, a collections of 100 billion stars, with some planets inside, clouds of gas, and so forth, and nothing outside, just emptiness stretching forever and ever. Well it's a very plausible idea that's certainly worth taking seriously if we didn't know any better.

Just 100 years ago, that was in fact, the leading understanding of what the universe was like. This was the so-called island universe idea, that we lived in the Milky Way, this collection of stars orbiting around each other, yet there wasn't anything else. There wasn't anything outside the Milky Way.

However, astronomers did know there were different kinds of things inside the Milky Way. When we look at the sky with our perfect vision, we see stars which always just appear like points, no matter how much you zoom in or magnify them. There is no telescope on earth that can ever expand any star enough to make it look like a disk. It's always going to be point-like. Yet there were other objects that were not stars that you could definitely see did have an extent. These were called nebulae (plural of nebula), which look like fuzzy little patches of light in the telescope or on a photographic plate.

So 100 years ago, this was the hot topic in astrophysics. What are these fuzzy little patches called nebulae? Here's a picture of the Orion Nebula. This is a picture that they couldn't have 100 years ago. We have much better telescopes today. We see it's a very colorful and rich collection of gas and dust. In fact we know today that this is a star-forming region, a huge cloud of gas that is gradually collapsing under its mutual gravitational force, and will splinter off eventually to form individual stars.

So that is one kind of the many types of nebulae that exist. The Orion Nebula is right here in the Milky Way, with many other nebula just like it, also here in our galaxy. Here is another picture of a nebula, called the Andromeda Nebula. To a telescope of 100 years ago, this looked like a fuzzy patch, just like the Orion Nebula looked like to them. All these different nebulae you could see 100 years ago, had different shapes and sizes, yet all they were all still just fuzzy little patches. We knew they weren't stars, but didn't know what they were.

The truth is that the Andromeda Nebula is actually the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromeda nebula is its own collection of 100 billion stars, orbiting under their mutual gravitational attraction. In other words, the Andromeda Nebula is just like the Milky Way. It is not inside the Milky Way, but is a separate collection well outside the Milky Way. So we do not live in an island universe, but a universe that is filled with other galaxies just like ours.

So how do we know that? This is something that was first figured out by Edwin Hubble, a remarkable figure in his own right. It took Hubble quite awhile to find himself as an academic, growing up more famed by his athletic prowess than anything else. He was a high school track champion, he played for the University of Chicago basketball team when they won the national championship, which they're not likely to repeat ever again! He was a Rhodes Scholar, so went to Oxford and studied law for awhile, then Spanish for awhile. He came back to the US and actually worked as a high school basketball coach, as well as a lawyer!

Eventually he realized his true calling was astronomy, so he got a degree, a Ph.D. in astronomy, and went to California in order to go to the Mt. Wilson Observatory, which at the time was the world's leading astronomical observatory. They had just built a huge new telescope, the 100 inch Hooker Telescope. The 100 inches refers to the diameter of the mirror used to collect light. So you had a large mirror collecting light which could see distant stars and galaxies with a better perception than you ever had before.

So what Hubble did was to look at things that looked like nebulae, little fuzzy patches. First, he was able to resolve some of these patches into individual stars. Not everywhere in the patch, not in their centers, but at the edges of some of these these nebulae, he could see that it was not just gas and dust, but there were individual stars there, and a lot of them!

That was certainly suggestive that these were not in fact just clouds of gas here in our galaxy, but were individual collections all by themselves. Yet he still couldn't be sure. It could just be that there were a few stars, but still relatively close and inside our galaxy. How do you know how big the Andromeda Galaxy is? You can't count all the 100 billion stars!

The answer is that Hubble was able to measure the distance to the Andromeda Nebula. He was able to figure out that the distance between us and Andromeda was such that given the stars he observed, there must be "billions and billions" as Carl Sagan would say, of stars in that nebula.

So how do you do that? You use a technique called "standard candles." This is a very simple idea. Imagine that you have some object at a certain distance away, like a candle, and you can see that it has a certain brightness. Then someone takes that object and they move it, twice as far away. If you're in a dark room and all you see is the object getting further away, once it's twice as far away, it will seem dimmer to you. In fact, if it's exactly twice as far away, it will only have 1/4 of the original brightness. There is an inverse square law, so as something gets further away, it looks dimmer. That makes perfect sense to us.

The problem is that if you don't know the intrinsic brightness of the candle to begin with, you can't figure out how far away it is. So the difference between a candle and a standard candle, is that the latter is something whose intrinsic brightness is known. If you know how bright something would be, if it were a fixed distance from you, and you know how bright it appears to you, then you can calculate how far away it must be to make that distance and brightness make sense.

So one of the major projects in astrophysics and cosmology 100 years ago, and still today, is to find standard candles and measure the distances to things. As you're standing outside just looking at stars in the universe, indeed you see all these stars but have no idea off the top of your head, how far away they are! So astronomers had to build up what they called the cosmic distance ladder, in which the most important technique is the use of standard candles.

Hubble used standard candles called cepheid variable stars. This is a type of star that pulsates, getting bigger and smaller. Yet the "standard candleness" is not absolute, so that cepheid variable are not all exactly the same brightness, but they also don't all have exactly the same period of oscillation.

By 1908, an astronomer at Harvard named Henrietta Levitt, though women were not even allowed to be called astronomers at the time, made one of the crucial discoveries in all of astronomy. There is a relationship between how bright the intrinsic brightness of the cepheid variable, and its period of variation. So even though you don't know its intrinsic brightness just from the fact that it is a cepheid variable, if you can measure its period, then suddenly you do know how bright it really is.

So Levitt calibrated this relationship, which taught us if we saw a certain period, then it must have a certain intrinsic brightness. Hubble went to his Hooker telescope, the 100 inch at Mt. Wilson, and he discovered cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda galaxy, as well as in other galaxies. He noticed that these variable stars, given their periods, were much dimmer than the cepheid variables in our galaxy. So he could work out how far away they were, and he realized that Andromeda was a galaxy all by itself, comparable in size to the Milky Way.

In fact we now know that we live in a local group of galaxies, with the Milky Way and Andromeda being the two largest galaxies in the group, with many smaller galaxies as satellites of the two. So Hubble established the first important fact about our universe, namely that it is big. In fact, we now know that in our observable universe, there are about 100 billion galaxies that we can observe. That's a convenient number, and in fact 100 billion is basically the only number you need to remember in terms of how big the universe is.

This is because there are about 100 billion stars in a typical galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. The age of the universe is about 14 billion years, yet even that works out to be very close to 100 billion dog-years! One ordinary human year is just 7 dog-years, so 14 billion times 7 is very close to 100 billion, which is the number for the scale of the universe in different units.

Here is a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, named after Hubble which is an orbiting satellite built by NASA. This particular picture is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. All they did was take the telescope and point it to the most blank area in the sky they could find, where they didn't know of anything in the field of view, but they let it sit there and collect a large number of photons over a long period of time, and then so to speak, they developed the image.

What we see in this picture is a lot of galaxies, almost every little dot here is a galaxy all by itself, with literally billions of stars in it. So Edwin Hubble was the one to figure out that the universe is big. That not only do we have a galaxy with 100 billion stars, but that galaxy is not unique. It's one of 100 billion galaxies spread throughout the universe. So that's a nice picture of what the universe is made of. It's not an island, not just the Milky Way galaxy surrounded by nothingness. There's a collection of galaxies spread out.

Yet don't get complacent, because the universe is not just staying there, but it's getting bigger. This is the second important fact about the universe, after the fact that it's big. The second fact is that it's getting bigger, and this is also discovered by Hubble.

He was not the first to get onto some idea like this, in fact. An astronomer named Vesto Slipher noticed that galaxies that he observed tended to be redshifted, from the light that came from them. So what does that mean? When we have atoms giving off light, it is very frequently the case that the light it gives off in a certain kind of atom, is always at the same frequency. The wavelength that you have of light, will be determined by what kind of atom is giving it off.

So if you look at an atom that's giving off this light, you know what wavelength the light should have. Yet when he looked at distant galaxies, he noticed that all the wavelengths of light he was observing were stretched. We'll go into this in more detail later, but basically you go from a short wavelength blue photon (particle of light), to a longer wavelength red photon. Slipher found that this was happening over and over again in the galaxies he observed.

Now the phenomenon in the shift of the wavelength of light, was well known as the Doppler effect. This was the thing that makes the pitch of noise change as the object goes by you. You start with something coming toward you, and it goes by. The very high-pitched noise you hear when it's coming toward you, will convert to a low-pitched noise as it goes away from you.

That's just because the waves of sound coming toward you are compressed, while those going away from you are elongated or lengthened. So you get a blueshift when something is coming toward you, something is squeezed to shorter wavelengths, while something going away from you will have a redshift.

So Slipher looked at all these galaxies and saw they were all redshifted. In other words, all these galaxies seemed to be moving away from us. So that's half-way to saying that the universe is expanding, and all the galaxies are moving away from us. Yet it's not quite all the way. It was Hubble who figured out the rest of the story, because he knew how to measure the distances to galaxies.

So Hubble went with his collaborator Milton Humason, and compared the distances to galaxies that he had measured, to the redshifts that Slipher had measured, and found a fascinating result. The apparent velocity that the galaxy would have to have, moving away from you to explain its redshift, was strongly correlated with the distance. The correlation is that the further away an object is, the faster its moving away from you. So that is what you need to be able to say that the universe is expanding.

So instead of a bunch of galaxies exploding away in some primeval explosion, if we imagine that the whole universe is just getting bigger, if the space in between all the galaxies is expanding, then you will see close-by galaxies move away gradually, while far-away galaxies will be zooming away at high speeds, since there's more space in between to do the expanding. That was what Hubble discovered.

He didn't call it that though. The plot we see is Hubble's original plot of the data. He plotted the distance on the x-axis and velocity on the y-axis. It kind of looks like a noisy plot with a scattering of points. Yet Hubble was a genius, so he drew a straight line through it and turned out to be correct.

The next plot is a much more modern version that looks like the points are much more closely aligned with a straight line, which is true, but also the size over which it's now measuring distances and velocities has grown enormously. So we really do have very strong evidence that the universe is expanding.

If you look at this plot and think about what its telling you, you realize that even though the universe is expanding, even though all the galaxies are moving away from us, it is not that we are in the center of the universe. We see nearby galaxies moving away, and further away galaxies moving away even faster. Yet someone in that middle galaxy, the one in between, would see us moving away in one direction, and the distant galaxy moving away in the other direction.

In other words, in this collection, every galaxy sees every other galaxy moving away from it, and the further they are, the faster they are moving away. There's no special point to this. Every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy. It's the whole universe that is expanding all at once.

So Hubble had an equation. We'll actually show this equation! Occasionally in this course we'll see an equation, though we won't use them. It's important not just to mention that equations exist, but to actually look at them and show what they're saying. So here's an equation:

v = Hd

Velocity equals H times the distance. H is a constant, a number, which we now call Hubble's constant. So this equation is just telling us that the velocity of a distant galaxy is some fixed number once and for all, times the distance to that galaxy. So the further away the galaxy is, the faster it's moving away.

We say once and for all, because in our universe today, every galaxy obeys this law. Yet the Hubble constant is really better to be called the Hubble parameter, since it's telling us how fast the universe is expanding. In the past, the universe was expanding much more quickly. So what we call the Hubble constant, was a much bigger number in the early universe.

It turns out that measuring the actual value of the Hubble constant is much harder than you might think. It's been something that cosmologists and astronomers have been struggling with for decades, yet they think they've finally pinned it down. Wendy Freedman of Carnegie Observatories and her collaborators, have measured the value of the Hubble constant, and the answer they got is 72 km/sec/Mpc.

So what does that mean, km/sec/Mpc? It's telling us that the Hubble constant converts from distances to velocities, so 72 km/sec/Mpc, means that one galaxy, one Mpc (megaparsec) away, will be seen to be moving 72 km/sec away from you. If it's 2 Mpc away, It will be moving 144 km/sec away from you.

So what is a Mpc? It's a million parsecs, where a parsec is about 3 light years. In other words, a parsec is about 30 trillion km, a very big distance. An Mpc is a typical distance to a fairly nearby galaxy. So this number, the Hubble constant, 72 km/sec/Mpc, measured by Wendy Freedman in the 1990s, is basically setting the scale for the universe. It sets the time it takes for the universe to expand, and sets the distances to different galaxies. So the fact that we've figures out what this number is, is a big step forward in our understanding in the scale and size of the universe.

Now that we know that distant galaxies have this relationship, the Hubble law, their apparent velocities we observe are proportional to their distances, it become much easier to map out the universe. Measuring distances to galaxies is hard. You can't find cephied variables in very distant galaxies, they're just too faint. Measuring redshifts is easy, so we can use the redshifts, the velocity measurements, as a stand-in for distances. You know that the bigger the velocity, the further something away is.

Now we see a plot that is a picture of where galaxies are in the universe, created by a survey called the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey). We live at the center of this picture, and we see two cones going out in either direction. That's just because there was a northern hemisphere survey and a southern hemisphere survey. It costs money to collect every one of these data points, so they didn't observe the whole sky, they just observed parts of it.

Every one of the little dots, almost too small to be seen individually, represents a separate galaxy. So this is hundreds of thousands of galaxies, spread throughout the universe. We see two important lessons here. One is that the universe is basically the same everywhere. There's no dramatic difference between one side of the sky and the other, or from place to place in that universe.

If you took a big sphere of space that was sufficiently big, megaparsecs across, and took the number of galaxies in that sphere, another sphere in a completely different part of the universe that was just as big, would have basically the same number of galaxies. This is the crucial simplifying feature that makes it possible to study our universe in a systematic way. It's more or less the same.

The second feature is that it's not exactly the same. When you look closely at this image, you see there is structure there. There are little holes where there are almost no galaxies, and are concentrations where there are more galaxies. Those are clusters and superclusters of galaxies.

The evolution of the universe at early times from being almost perfectly smooth, to being the slightly non-smooth, lumpy distribution we see in this picture, is a fascinating story that cosmologists are just beginning to unravel right now. The universe is pretty smooth on large scales right now, in the past it was even smoother, so we're trying to understand how we got here from there.

So that's the picture that we have of the universe. It's quite a nice picture, but it's also quite provocative. To put it into context, we'll say the basics again. The universe is big, not just one compact collection of stars, but it spreads out as far as we can see. It's getting bigger as the space in between galaxies is growing. This manifests itself as the idea that every galaxy we see, appears to be moving away from us. Hubble's law tells us that the further away it is, the faster it appears to be receding.

It is smooth on large scales, so we can treat the universe locally in basically the same way that we treat the universe far away. The same average density, the same number of galaxies, the same basic properties of the universe, should apply here as well as somewhere very far away.

Then we can start thinking about what that means. If the universe is getting bigger now, that means that in the past it was smaller. We can imagine taking the current state of the universe and asking what it was like? Where did we come from? So if things were smaller, they were denser, closer together, with more things in every cubic light year and every cubic megaparsec.

If that keeps going, if you can extrapolate that back and things became very densely packed, very hot as things bump together, they heat up. If you keep going, you get to the Big Bang. You get to a point where the density is infinitely large. Where everything is on top of everything else. That would be a naive extrapolation from the fact that we're expanding now, you go backwards and what do you find, but that everything is on top of everything else.

It's perfectly reasonable to say we shouldn't be so naive. There might be some change in velocity of expansion, a change in the expansion rate. Maybe it started out not expanding? Maybe the universe was static and only slowly began to grow? So what we need is a theory. It's not enough to make the observations right now that the universe it expanding. We need a theoretical understanding of how it should expand in the presence of different kinds of stuff.

So that theoretical understanding is given to us by Einstein's theory of General Relativity, invented about 1915. The expansion of the universe was finally discovered by Hubble in 1929. So physicists had about 14 years to play around and try to figure out what should happen, according to General Relativity. What they figured out, will be he subject of the next lecture and the one after that. This is that the expansion of the universe depends on what is inside.

So in other words, after this picture of what the universe is like, we're drawn back to the questions of dark matter and dark energy. We have claimed in the introductory lecture that 95% of the universe is dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is some kind of heavy, massive, slowly moving particle with a local gravitational field. Dark energy is something that is smoothly spread out, and is something that persists. It doesn't go away as the universe expands.

So given those ingredients, given the theoretical understanding of space and time that General Relativity provides, we can ask the question of what the universe looked like in the past. Was there a Big Bang? What will happen to the universe in the future? Will it expand forever or will it contract?

Now these are not trivial questions. When Einstein invented General Relativity, someone started saying very quickly thereafter that if space-time were expanding according to his theory, there should be something called the redshift. There should be a lengthening of the wavelength of photons. Yet not everyone believed it. Einstein himself was very skeptical about this effect.

So when Hubble found that the universe was expanding, found that distant galaxies obeyed this relationship, and had a velocity proportional to their distance, he never spoke about that phenomenon in terms of General Relativity. Hubble never said, "I discovered the expansion of the universe that people working with General Relativity had predicted." He always talked about just what he observed. He was a really good observer, and didn't want to make predictions or judgments on the basis of theories.

So Hubble never said he had discovered the expansion of the universe, but that he discovered that distant galaxies were moving at a velocity that was proportional to their distance. He also kept saying he deserved the Nobel Prize for discovering this, yet he never did. In his time, the Nobel Prize all the time, which is as it should be!

The next lecture will talk about Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity, for which he also never won the Nobel Prize. Yet it forms the basis for our understanding of space and time, so will let us make sense of this picture of an expanding universe.

1. Fundamental Building Blocks - Sean Carroll - Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe

Sean Carroll outlines his plan to cover nothing less than the history, current beliefs, and future prospects of cosmology in only 24 lectures. This larger structure is to be repeated in smaller cycles throughout the course, helping one to retain the material long term. The three part cycle includes a review of how we got to where we are, why we currently believe our theories, and then speculations on what our theories imply. The first cycle reviews how astronomical observations culminate into the theories of Einstein and particle physics. The following cycle combines these latter two with more recent observations into an introduction for dark matter and dark energy. The last cycle concentrates on the leading theories of what the latter two are composed of, and how we might develop a test for them.

The previous TTC lectures on these subjects were given by the very animated Alex Filippenko. In fact, the webcasts of Alex's astronomy courses at Berkeley show him to be even more entertaining in the role of professor! Sean Carroll seems more reserved and serious, maybe due to the more quantitative approach. If Sean can somehow present the material on a whole new level than Alex, I can see the value of this course. If not, then it just seems like duplicate material. The course guide is enhanced with extra material in the appendix, in addition to the usual timeline, glossary, bio, and bibliography.

Welcome to this course on the dark side of the universe. Not the dark side of "the force," since we're not going to be talking about good and evil very much, but the part of the universe that we don't see directly, and nevertheless modern physicists and cosmologists have been able to piece together.

The news we'll get across in the next 24 lectures is that we have basically figured out what the universe is made of. It's an impressive accomplishment, and is only something that happens once in the history of the human race, when you figure out what the universe is made of, and it happened! It happened at the very end of the 20th century, at least we're pretty sure it happened. We have a picture that holds together very well, and we'll be getting the evidence for why we believe in that picture, and what the other possibilities are. These other possibilities are even more dramatic than the idea that we got it right, so it's a no-lose proposition!

Before going into any of the details, we'll give away the punchline away right at the start, and explain what it is that we think we have figured out. It's basically encapsulated in this pie-chart. It's nice to know that all the secrets of the universe on the largest scales can be fit into one tiny little pie-chart that reveals a lot.

This pie-chart is telling us the ingredients of which the universe is made, and the amount of slice that you have as to how much of that stuff you have in the universe. That little yellow slice in the pie-chart, 5% of the universe, is what we call ordinary matter. By this, physicists mean every single particle that we've ever detected directly, in any experiment ever done anywhere on earth, ever.

So Sean is made of ordinary matter, we are made of ordinary matter, this table, every star, every planet, every bit of gas and dust that we've seen, is ordinary matter, the stuff that we see directly. All of this is only 5% of the universe.

Yet 25% of the universe is the red part of the pie-chart, what we call dark matter. It's matter, it's stuff, it's some kind of particles that move around, but it's dark, we don't see it directly.

The rest of the universe, 70%, is something even more exotic than dark matter, called dark energy. The idea of dark energy is something that is smoothly spread out throughout the universe. So there's this same amount of dark energy here, as over there, as somewhere in the desolate cold of inter-galactic space. Yet 70% of the universe is this smoothly distributed kind of energy we call dark energy. We know something about it, so it's not that we know nothing. Yet it's a very interesting picture.

So there's a lot to mention about this inventory we're claiming to having. One the one hand, when we call something dark matter and dark energy, it makes it sound like we don't know very much. What is this stuff? Yet that's not precisely true. We'll make it clear over the course of these lectures that we do know some things about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. There's things we don't know and also things we know.

The important part is that the dark matter and dark energy are different than ordinary matter. It's not that we've just missed something, like some stars we haven't seen yet, or some gas and dust spread smoothly throughout the universe, and this is really the dark matter. The truth is that all of the particles, all the ordinary stuff, all that's made of atoms and molecules is counted in that ordinary matter.

The dark matter and dark energy are made of something we haven't detected directly. We have evidence for believing that, and we'll find out what that is. All this, of course, unless we are missing something, unless we're getting something wrong! So it is possible that the inferences that we use to go from observations of the universe to the existence of dark matter and dark energy, have gone wrong somewhere along the way. It's not that we've made a mistake with the observations.

Of course if you make one observation, it's always possible that you've made a mistake. Yet at this point it's where we've made observation after observation and keep getting the same result. So there's something going on in the universe, and not that we've made a mistake in taking our data. Yet we could be making a mistake in interpreting the data somehow. The way we get from observations to the idea that there's dark matter and dark energy is to use the force of gravity. It's always possible that there's something wrong with our understanding of the force of gravity and we'll be talking about that possibility.

So one of the themes throughout these lectures is going to be what we know is true, what we believe pretty strongly is true, versus what we speculate might be true. We know that the universe is about 14 billion years old, if you count from the Big Bang to today. It's not worth talking about the possibility that the universe is only 1 billion years old, since we know better than that. We believe that 95% of the universe is a dark sector, 25% of it is dark matter, 70% is dark energy. Yet we don't know that for absolutely sure, because there are interesting alternatives. Yet that is the theory that fits the data by far the best.

Now we start speculating about what is that stuff? What is the dark matter? What is the dark energy? Where do they come from? Why do they have the amounts that they do? Then we're into a regime where we're making hypotheses, and we'll be interested in figuring out which one of those is true, but we don't quite know yet.

So over the next several lectures we're going to be talking about how we got there, why we believe that 95% of the universe is in this dark sector, and where we go next? What is going to be the kind of ideas we're approaching and the experimental techniques we're going to be using to get there?

Yet first let's step back, put ourselves in context, and talk about what we're doing over the course of these lectures. Talking about dark matter and dark energy is participating in a kind of discussion that has been going on since ancient times. We're asking, "What is the world made of at a fundamental level?" The idea is that everything you see, whether us or this table or a star or galaxy, can be reduced to a certain set of small components. All the different kinds of things you see, the difference between us and this table, is that the small components that make them and us, are arranged in different ways.

It didn't have to be that way. It could be that different things were just different. The stuff that makes up this table is just a completely different kind of stuff that makes up us or the stars. Yet way back to the ancient Greeks, people have been wondering about the other possibility. Maybe there's only a small number of fundamental elementary constituents, and they get rearranged in different ways to make very different looking things.

Now if you were an ancient Greek, what you would say the elementary constituents are, are the elements, earth, air, fire, and water. You would explain different substances that you saw, by combining earth, air, fire, and water, in different proportions and in different ways. Now that idea didn't fare very well! It didn't really become a scientific theory. Yet the important insight was made that is a small number of ingredients, and all we do when we describe the world is take those ingredients and put them together in different combinations.

That is still the kind of idea we're pursuing in science today. It's been very successful, so we're going to be talking about what those modern elementary constituents are. These days, it's not earth, air, fire, and water, but elementary particles. We have a set of particles, a set of individual tiny dots, that arrange together in different ways that pull on each other, using different kinds of forces, and make the stuff of which we are made. Now it was Democritus back in ancient Greece who first proposed that the universe is made of individual particles, and he called them atoms. So an atom to Democritus was the tiniest little thing that you could make. If you took an object, you could divide it up into pieces and pieces, yet there's a point at which you can't divide it anymore. There's a smallest possible piece, and Democritus called that an atom.

So chemists in the 19th century took the elements of which we're made, carbon, iron, hydrogen, helium, and so forth, and realized that there was in fact a smallest particle of which chemical elements were made. So they called these smallest particles atoms. Now these days, we know that the atoms we call atoms, are not the truly elementary particles. They're not indivisible, so you can actually divide atoms up.

Yet it remains true that if you want to keep something being a chemical element, then it must be made of atoms. So we have an interesting way of characterizing all the atoms we see, in the Periodic Table of the Elements. We have different kinds of atoms, arranged in different patterns which give us different kinds of elements, and the chemists of the 19th century figured out how this was made. You get, these days, over 100 different chemical elements.

That could have been the end of the story. That could be the universe in which we live. The chemical elements were the different elementary particles, and what we called atoms in the 19th century were in fact what Democritus was calling atoms.

Yet that turns out not to be true. You take an atom, and these days we know we can smash them, take them apart. What do we see? These days what we call an atom, we realize is a nucleus made of protons and neutrons, where protons are heavy positively charged particles, neutrons are heavy neutral particles, joined together into an atomic nucleus. Around the atomic nucleus are spinning much smaller particles called electrons, which are negatively charged.

If you have the same number of electrons spinning around the nucleus as you have protons inside the nucleus, the total amount of charge in the atom will be zero. A typical atom has zero net electrical charge. So we can take that atom, which is an electron or set of electrons spinning around a nucleus, and we can divide it. We can say, move the electron over there, and we have a nucleus left.

Then we can divide that. We can take the nucleus and we can divide it into protons and neutrons. So it is natural to ask if we can take protons and neutrons, and divide them up into something even smaller? This is something not figured out until the 1960s and 1970s, but we now know that the answer is yes. Protons and neutrons are made of smaller elementary particles, which we call quarks.

There's something called the up quark with a charge of +2/3, and something called the down quark which has a charge of -1/3. As we go later in lectures, we'll learn of all sorts of different elementary particles and we'll realize that sometimes that names for them are very clever, sometimes they're very boring. So you have the proton with two up quarks in it, and one down quark. You can do the math, which comes out to a +1 charge. The neutron on the other hand, has two down quarks and one up quark, so it is neutral.

So that is another layer of structure. We see the direction in which we're going. We go from atoms which make chemical elements, we divide them into electrons and nuclei (plural of nucleus), we take the nucleus and divide it into protons and neutrons, which we take and divide into quarks.

It's very natural to ask at this point if there is yet another layer. If we took an electron or a quark, could we divide those into smaller pieces? The answer is we don't know, but most of us believe that we cannot. We actually think that electrons and quarks are part of the bottom layer of which ordinary matter is constructed. We'll go into the evidence for that a little bit later.

Yet the key point here is ordinary matter coming out of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, so we can make everything we've ever seen! That's enough for all of chemistry, all of economics, psychology, literature, and so forth! It's all up quarks, down quarks, and electrons!

If we look out into the sky, we see stars, galaxies, gas, and dust. Again, it's just quarks and electrons arranged in different combinations. We know that the quarks are there, because we've done experiments at particle accelerators. We take heavy particles with high energies and zoom them towards each other at very high velocities. They smash into each other and they make more particles. That's how we discover new and new layers, but we think that the tiniest particles have now been discovered.

The next question is what are the heavier particles that we haven't yet discovered? We have a good reason for understanding why we haven't discovered heavy particles, namely that a particle accelerator takes more and more energy to make heavier and heavier particles! Einstein taught us that energy is mass times the speed of light squared, E=mc². So if you want to make a more massive particle, you need more energy in your particle accelerator, which costs money. So there's a financial limit right now on how many heavy particles we can discover and we're trying to push that more and more beyond.

The question is what other ways are there to discover new particles? We have a very nice picture of almost everything we've ever seen. We have the quarks and electrons, the ability to put together atoms, into molecules, into proteins, into desks and us, and stars, gas, and dust!

Yet is it possible that there's other stuff out there that we haven't seen in the laboratory? How would we know? The answer is to look into the sky. The question that we're thinking of here, is that when you look at the sky, you see things, stars, galaxies, stars being formed, etc. Yet is that what there mostly is in the universe? Are the things that you directly see, the same things that the universe is really made up of?

The other possibility is that the things we really see are more like a decoration. So we are more like the olive in the martini of the universe. It's the part you see, but maybe not the important part for the whole concoction. So how would you know if there was stuff in the universe, if you can't see it? By construction we're saying that there's stuff there that we don't see, how are we ever supposed to figure out that it's there? Of course we're asking the question in a fairly leading way, and should be clear that it's very easy to become convinced that something exists, even though you don't see it.

For example, there is air here in this room. We're convinced that it's here, even though we don't see it. We can see right through the air. Well how do we know? How do we know for sure that there is air in the room? There's many different ways we could demonstrate that. One way is just to wave our hands in the air and fell something reacting against them. The air exerts a force on our hands, even though we don't see it. We have other senses besides sight, that can feel the air in the room, even though it's invisible and the air is dark in some sense, and doesn't emit or absorb light. It's easy enough to tell that it's there.

So how do we do the analogous thing to waving our hand, except that we do it in the sky? The answer is we can't just put our hand into the sky and wave it around, but we can feel the force of gravity, or more precisely, we can detect the influence of gravity on other celestial objects. So if there's some stuff out there in the universe, some stuff that exists, and there's as much of it or even more of it than there is ordinary matter, that stuff will create a gravitational field. We can then detect its gravitational field, which provides us the secret to detecting the dark side of the universe.

So imagine for example if the moon were invisible and transparent, if we couldn't see the moon whatsoever, and we could look into the sky with any sort of telescope we wanted and still could never detect that it was there. Could we nevertheless be sure that there was such a thing as the moon? Could we weigh it and figure out where it was?

The answer is yes, since back here on earth, we could observe the tides that occur on our oceans. Tides are due to the influence of the moon, on the oceans here on earth. In particular, the moon has a gravitational field, which pushes around the water in the oceans and bays on earth, so we can therefor detect just by looking at the waves and tides in the oceans, that there must be something out there exerting a gravitational field. You can even figure out where it was and even weigh it. You can figure out how much gravity had to be exerted.

Fortunately we can see the moon, so we don't have to do that. Yet you can do the same kind of process for other things in the universe. You can look out there in the universe, see the gravitational fields that are being created and then attribute them to some kind of stuff, even if you can't see the stuff directly.

So you see the possible loophole in the argument at the same time. In order to do this inference, you need to understand how gravity works. So even though we think that we do understand how gravity works, we'll take seriously the possibility that we're being tricked, that something else is going on, so that we don't understand gravity. We'll try to ask whether it's possible that there isn't any dark matter or dark energy, and instead that we just don't understand gravity?

The ultimate answer will be probably not, that we think we do understand gravity, that we think there is dark matter and there is dark energy, but we need to keep every single possibility open until absolutely sure.

The other thing we're trying to do, of course, is to go beyond looking at dark matter and dark energy through their gravitational fields, and detect them directly. So another possibility we'll be discussing is building experiments her on earth that will produce dark matter particles, or that will wait until dark matter particles come into the detector and bounce off of it, and therefor give us direct evidence that dark matter really exists. That may or may not be possible, and depends on properties of the dark matter. Yet we'll try to do that, and you never know what may happen.

So let's just outline the entire rest of the course. We won't keep any surprises until the end, so we'll give everything away. The picture we're painting in some sense, makes a lot of sense. Yet in other senses, it's surprising on some levels. It's better to hear the same story over and over again so it can really sink in, and we can understand what is going on. The first part of the course, lectures 2-6, will be about just looking at the universe. Actually going out there in the universe, looking with a telescope at what's in the sky, seeing how galaxies are distributed, where they came from, and so forth. That's part of how we begin to understand what the universe is made of.

Yet just looking doesn't get us very far, so at the same time in the same lectures 2-6, we'll also be talking about the underlying framework that we use to understand the dynamics of the universe. That framework was given to us by Albert Einstein in the form of his General Theory of Relativity, which we'll talk about as being a theory of space and time, and how it grows.

So through the first couple of lectures, we'll be going back and forth through looking at the universe, seeing what is out there, and then coming back here and thinking about it. When we think about what could be going on, then we get a better idea of what should be going on. When you then go back to look, you then say, "Aha, I now understand something about the universe that I didn't understand before."

What we'll see from looking at the universe and putting it in the context of Einstein's General Relativity is that first, the universe is a pretty simple place. It looks more or less the same all over the place, except that it's getting bigger. The universe is expanding, it used to be smaller and in the future will be bigger, which is an interesting fact we need to think about.

Yet the second thing is that the dynamics of the particles we observe in the universe can't be explained only by those particles. In other words, what we'll do is look at stuff in the universe from various perspectives, radio telescopes, ordinary telescopes, individual galaxies, clusters of galaxies, we'll take the universe as a whole and then put it back together.

We'll then realize that it doesn't quite make sense all by itself! The only way to make sense of the dynamics of stuff in the universe in the context of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, is to imagine there is stuff there that we don't see. This is of course the stuff that we call dark matter. We'll see that if we imagine there is stuff in the universe that we don't see, then suddenly the dynamics of galaxies and clusters of galaxies begins to make sense to us.

So that is telling us that there is something out there, something in the universe that we haven't yet directly detected here on earth. We have a very good view of the kinds of particles that exist in atoms, and they don't seem to be the same kinds of particles that exist out there, that we are calling dark matter. So in lectures 7 and 8, we'll take a step backwards, back to earth, and try to talk about the actual particles we know and love, those particles in what we call the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

We said that electrons plus up and down quarks are enough to make all the stuff we are familiar with. Well how do we know that? So in lecture 7 we'll talk about what different kinds of particles there can be. There are boson particles which basically pile up on top of each other and make forces, and there are fermion particles that take up space, and those make up matter. It's good that they take up space, because otherwise everything would just collapse in together. So these different kinds of particles are both necessary in making an interesting universe, and thankfully they actually exist.

Then in lecture 8 we'll go into the specifics, given that we can have bosons and fermions. What are the particles we actually have in the universe? What is the complete set that particle physicists have detected? It's actually quite a nice picture that has been constructed. We've put together basically a mini-periodic table of the elementary particles of nature.

In that table there are still mysteries. There are still things we don't understand about why these particles, and why not those particles? Yet it's a very impressive accomplishment that's very consistent with a tremendous amount of data. It's kind of depressing actually to be a particle physicist. You don't like it when your theory is consistent with all the data. You like it when there are puzzles that you can try to explain.

So one project in particle physics is to push our knowledge into some region where the standard model of particle physics isn't good enough. Cosmologists have already done that. They've found dark matter and one of the things we'll be talking about is why we think that dark matter is not part of the standard model of particle physics.

Then we have some knowledge of particles, so we can move back in lectures 9-11 and apply if to the universe. In particular, we'll apply it to the early universe, the very famously labeled first three minutes of the universe are a time when things were crunched together, at much higher temperatures and densities, and all of those particles we discovered in the standard model of particle physics, were playing important roles in the very early universe.

So we'll take the universe we have today, and we're going to run the movie backwards to when everything was packed closer together at high temperatures and densities, and use particle physics to predict what things would have been like, and then wind the movie forward again. We'll start making predictions for what our current universe should be like, based on our predictions for what the past was like, and given what we think particle physics was like.

The remarkable thing is that it's going to work! We're going to get the right answer by making predictions based on what was going on in the first few seconds of the universe's history, which will turn out to be correct. That means we understand something important about what was going on just a few seconds after the Big Bang.

In particular, there are two phenomena we'll focus on during these lectures. One is Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the other is the CMB (cosmic microwave background). Big Bang nucleosynthesis refers to the time in the universe's history when it was a nuclear reactor that was taking individual protons and neutrons and fusing them together to make heavier elements. The specific detailed properties of what was going on when the universe was only a few minutes old, come into making predictions for how much of each kind of element we should have. That's the kind of prediction we can make, and it turns out to be right.

The CMB is also describing a relic from the earliest times. It is the light that was emitted by the universe at the earliest times. When the universe was young enough, it was opaque. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face, imagining that you were there at the very early universe, but when it was about 400,000 years after the big bang, it became transparent.

So suddenly the light that was emitted from the very earliest times of the universe, could stream across the universe into our telescopes and be detected today. It's been stretched into the microwave regime, just like your microwave oven at home, and we observe that today as the cosmic microwave background. It turns out you can learn a lot about the universe by looking at what the CMB looks like today, and we'll talk about that as well.

Then finally in lecture 12, we get to talk about dark matter in some detail. We'll talk about what it could be. We have already seen, just by looking at the universe and applying General Relativity, that we need to imagine that dark matter exists. That is the only way we can make sense of what the universe is doing. So we're going to say, "OK, the dark matter does exist. What is it?"

Well there are different proposals within particle physics for what the dark matter could be. There are proposals that it could be ordinary stuff, it could be stars that are just crunched together, it could be black holes. We'll talk about those, but we'll argue that this is not going to be the right answer. There isn't enough ordinary stuff in the universe to be the dark matter. Probably it is some new kind of particle.

So then we'll ask what the new kind of particle could be? The most popular candidate for this, comes from something called supersymmetry. This is a new symmetry of nature that relates bosons to fermions, and predicts a whole bunch of new particles. One of them could very naturally be the dark matter, so particle physicists right now are very carefully looking for where that is in the universe, and in their particle physics experiments. So we'll emphasize a lot, the possibility of supersymmetry for the most popular candidate for what the dark matter particle could be, yet there are other candidates as well, and we'll talk about them too.

So then in lectures 14 and 15, we'll start talking about dark energy. This is not dark matter, but something different. It's very interesting that this 95% of the universe, which is the dark sector, is split into two very different kinds of things. So what we mean when we say that, is that in order to fit the data, we need to imagine that there are two different things out there in the dark sector.

One is the dark matter, which is a bunch of particles that settle down, pulling on each other, under their mutual gravitational field, and the other is the dark energy which is smooth. It does not clump together under gravity. It also does not go away as the universe expands. Ordinary matter, as the universe gets bigger and bigger, becomes less and less dense. Yet dark energy somehow persists.

So we'll talk about why we think there is dark energy. It turns out that the universe in recent times, has begun to accelerate. Not only is it expanding, but it's expanding faster and faster. This is not at all what we would have expected on the basis of a universe with just ordinary matter and radiation, even dark matter. The only way we can explain the acceleration, is to imagine there's something that doesn't go away, something called dark energy.

Then as a final consistency check, we're going to measure all of the stuff in the whole universe all at once. Just to make sure that we're not missing anything, we're going to use the entire universe as a scale, to weigh how much stuff there is, and find out if we imagine a universe which is 5% ordinary matter, 25% dark matter, 75% dark energy, all adds up to everything we see. That is the best evidence that we have, as we'll discuss, for the idea that we haven't missed anything, The idea that once we include the dark matter and dark energy, we have a complete inventory of what is in the universe.

So then of course we have to ask, what is this stuff? So in lectures 16-18, we'll discuss different possibilities for what the dark energy could be. It's something that's smooth, more or less the same everywhere, something that doesn't go away, so that gives us some clues for the different candidates of what it could be. None of these candidates, frankly, are very good. We're very much in the hypothesizing stage of doing science when it comes to dark energy. We'll at least talk about some of what these are.

Then by lecture 19 we'll take a step back and say, "OK, we've inferred the existence of dark matter and dark energy by measuring their gravitational fields. What is it that we don't understand gravity? As we said before, the idea that there is dark matter and dark energy, comes down to the fact that we need to invoke them to explain the motions of particles. Yet if gravity is different than we think, if Einstein was not right when he invented General Relativity, maybe we could do away with dark matter or dark energy. So we'll talk about that possibility.

In lecture 20, we'll pause a bit to look at inflation, which is a hypothetical idea in the very early universe. Yet it's closely connected to the ideas of dark matter and dark energy. Number one because the mechanism of inflation is almost exactly the same as that of dark energy, making the universe accelerate. Also number two, because inflation makes some predictions that turn out to be coming right, only if you believe in dark matter and dark energy. So we'll put those pieces of the puzzle together.

Now lectures 21 and 22 are like desert. We get a little treat for doing all this good work, looking at data. We're going to start imagining beyond thing we've actually observed. We'll talk about parts of the universe we have no access to, in what some call the multiverse, extra dimensions of space, and string theory, a hypothetical theory that weds together particle physics and gravity.

String theory should have something to say about dark matter and dark energy, but our current state of knowledge of the theory just isn't good enough to day anything for sure. So what we'll talk about with string theory is what might be true. If string theory happens in a certain way, what could the implications be for dark matter and dark energy?

Yet then to bring us back to earth, in lecture 23 we'll talk about how we're going to test these ideas. All through the course we'll be mentioning experiments and observations that have been done, and some that will be done in the future. Yet there's a whole bunch, a whole retinue of techniques that are going to be used to probe the universe on the smallest scales and the largest scales.

So we'll get an outline of what kinds of techniques are going to be used, not just in the next year or two, but the next ten years or 50 years, to learn more about dark matter and dark energy, as well as particle physics, string theory, and inflation.

So then finally in lecture 24, we'll talk about where we have gotten, and where we're going to go from here. We've learned a lot, a universe for which we claim to have a complete inventory. Yet in some sense, it doesn't quite match our expectations. This universe in which we are only 5%, puts us into a tiny little corner of the universe. We could have designed a much simpler and more elegant set of ingredients for the universe, but they didn't turn out that way.

So why is it like that, rather than some other way? How do we put these ideas into the bigger context? What can we learn, and why are we even thinking about these ideas?

So next time in lecture 2, we'll be very mundane and go outside on a clear night, talking about the universe and what we see.

Entrevista com Detlev Claussen e Notas sobre a Estação Americana de Theodor. W. Adorno e Max Horkheimer

Tsunami Islâmico
A Feira do Livro de Frankfurt de 2010 transcorreu sob a sombra da polêmica do ensaio populista islamôfobo de Thilo Sarrazin, ex-integrante do conselho do Banco Central e da cúpula do SPD, “Deutschland schaft sich ab” (“A Alemanha está se desfazendo”), autor também do recente clássico “Deutschland wird immer dümmer” (“A Alemanha está ficando cada vez mais burra”).

A querela encerrou-se com chave de ouro no discurso presidencial, no aniversário/balanço dos 20 anos de Reunificação. Christian Wulff tranqüilizou sua população: “O Islã, assim como o Cristianismo e o Judaísmo, é parte integrante da Alemanha”, para deleite, é claro, do sensacionalista “Bild”, porque a lição de História para 5ª. Série do Presidente não parece ser compartilhada pelos eleitores e pela maioria dos profetas do apocalipse, como o jornalista conservador Udo Ulfkotte, ícone da imprensa paralela na internet, especializado em desmascarar a suposta neutralidade da “Spiegel”, naquilo que denomina a “conspiração do silêncio e da covardia de nosso jornalismo”.

Para Ulfkotte e aquela “maioria silenciosa”, “um Tsunami islâmico vem devastando nosso continente”.

Já faz tempo que o antiislamismo vem ganhando nas democracias ocidentais coesão e consistência como o velho anti-semitismo do século XIX na forma de um imaginário que se amplifica em cada poro da internet à velocidade da luz.

Se a invenção da imprensa teve como resultado a maior caçada e queima de bruxas e hereges de que se tem noticia, na multiplicação de relatos fantasiosos e denúncias anônimas por escrito, a crescente imagem demoníaca do Islã na rede dificilmente mais poderá ser contida.

Se o demagogo Sarrazin resolvesse lançar um partido já em setembro, teria no mínimo 20% do eleitorado.
Mas a diferença desse sentimento na América e na Europa continental é que por aqui o apelo populista se dilui numa sociedade estagnada em seus nichos e com um déficit de modernização cultural, na qual a idéia mesma de mobilidade social desapareceu para sempre do imaginário. Sarrazin põe o dedo naquela fratura exposta do antigo modelo de “capitalismo renano”, vinculando sua derrocada ao novo terrorismo islâmico,

ao colapso demográfico e outras aberrações de próprio punho - consideradas cretinas e de mau gosto até em suas fileiras-, como a genética.

Contudo, uma analise sociológica mais sofisticada, como o trabalho do historiador Paul Nolte (“Riskante Moderne: Deutschland und der neue Kapitalismus”), mostra que ocidentalização vertiginosa da Alemanha ocidental entre os anos cinquenta e setenta não logrou colonizar todos os antigos nichos autoritários, porque simplesmente, em 1968, abriu-se um abismo de gerações que não foi mais preenchido, antes que a modernização cultural chegasse a cabo nesses bolsões, um processo engessado na história pela burocratização de quase todas as esferas da vida cotidiana e barreiras amortizadoras do antigo estado social.

Não surpreende, como conclui Paul Nolte, neste vácuo da desmontagem dos mecanismos reguladores, observar o déficit cultural do antigo “Mitte” (o “Centro” social) na relação com o verdadeiro, este sim, tsunami da externalização econômica e arremata: “Os alemães são analfabetos econômicos da globalização”. Por este mesmo motivo, Ulrich Beck afirmava recentemente que a sociologia alemã distanciara-se tanto da realidade social do país que se condenava à completa irrelevância. Se não bastasse a análise social consistente bater em retirada neste quadro desolador, a “Spiegel” apontava em maio que a coalizão de Angela Merkel, e a paralisia que a sustenta neste intervalo da história, representavam, sem dúvida, a “pior elite política do pós-guerra” da República Federal.

De linha de frente e foco intelectual da Guerra Fria, o debate e as polêmicas alemãs encolheram para o tom acanhado e moralizante da província, num pais para lá de envelhecido, com dificuldades em compatibilizar sua auto-imagem e peso econômico em declínio (perdeu terceiro posto no “ranking” para a China), com seu tamanho real na nova ordem internacional.

Sobra como compensação imaginária o “pathos” retrô de sua mídia ecoando incessantemente o carrossel de documentários nostálgicos sobre a odisséia do milagre e dos anos de ouro do capitalismo como uma ficção e “docutaiment” no “playground” da história virtual, como se o desfecho pudesse ser outro, outra especialidade da chatíssima “Spiegel TV”, ou mesmo do pretensioso franco-alemão, até no nome, “Arte TV”, este, além de entediante, antiamericano ate a medula, no seu assim decantado “olhar europeu” sobre a América.

Um momento irracional de gratidão
Não deixa de ser irônico, pensando justamente de Frankfurt, o disparate entre o prestígio e a recepção internacionais, mas, sobretudo, daquelas tarefas metodológicas que a Teoria Crítica de Adorno e Horkheimer se impuseram nos anos 50, no processo de democratização na análise da personalidade autoritária, depois de seu retorno, e a miséria destas dias da sociologia local.

O que mais surpreendente ainda, como apontava recentemente o historiador e professor de Sociologia da Universidade de Hannover, Detlev Claussen , numa conferência (http://www.univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/ring04/“Intellectual Transfer. Die amerikanische Erfahrung in der Kritischen Theorie”), é aquela “montanha de clichês e incompreensões” que soterrou o verdadeiro valor da experiência americana em ambos, bem como a perigosa mescla do sentimento antiamericano que se cristalizou na recepção nas décadas seguintes, baseada numa ambivalência de origem da relação cultural entre a jovem República Federal com a América. Sob esta “montanha de cliches”, foi se consolidando uma inverdade histórica crassa sobre a “origem social” da nova metodologia, mas, sobretudo, do verdadeiro sentido da crítica cultural em ambos.
Claussen lembra-se, como estudante, das acaloradas discussões com Horkheimer em maio de 1967, em meio à dualidade da admiração de sua geração pelas maravilhas econômicas do milagre, o influxo de juventude que a vistiva de Kennedy a Berlim trouxera, bem como seus novos estilos alternativos de vida e as imagens da guerra do Vietnam.

Confrontado com o atoleiro na Indochina, Horkheimer desabafou: “Senhoras e Senhores, solicito-lhes, por favor, que me concedam certo momento de irracionalidade na gratidão à America”. Para Claussen, ninguém entendeu na época a enorme extensão deste “momento irracional”, uma revelação que o perseguiu em sua carreira acadêmica, na verdade, a chave do momento de ouro da Teoria Critica, sua experiência americana. Claussen enumera caricatamente alguns destes clichês:

Clichê número um: Aqueles professores alemães tiveram que retornar em 1949, pois não podiam e nem tinham chances de se estabelecer metodologicamente na América, ainda mais em alemão com coisas tão complicadas como a dialética e Hegel, o que se desmente pela permanência de Marcuse e Loewenthal, por exemplo. Clichê número dois: O mito da suposta pureza língua alemã em Adorno, que nenhum pobre diabo poderia suportar em inglês e se transformaria na marca do “alemão adorno” e da auto-estilização ritual de seus discípulos.

Clichê número três: A suposta vulgaridade da cultura americana, pois o que poderiam fazer aqueles professores weimarianos tão sofisticados e adestrados nas vanguardas do entre-guerras neste “deserto californiano da cultura à sombra de Hollywood”. Clichê número quatro: Este o coroamente dos outros. A tão propalada saudade, a “Heimweh” de uma “paisagem cultural”, barroca, consistente diante “daquela estepe da falta de cultura” e das artimanhas diabólicas da maquina cultural. E como explicar o fato de eram amigos de um dos mais triunfantes diretores de Hollywood, Fritz Lang.

Num “close reading” da “Minima Moralia” e da “Dialética do Esclarecimento”, argumenta que a oposição entre uma suposta alta cultura teutônica e a americana não só é uma mentira, como inverte completamente a realidade, pois não havia mais nada na Europa além de ruínas, fome e do Exército Vermelho. Em primeiro lugar, aponta o horror de Adorno em relação à qualquer forma de crítica cultural conservadora e elitista, e mesmo a despeito dos “momentos críticos” em relação à cultura massa, prossegue, concordando com o fato de que o ensaio sobre a indústria cultural esteja realmemte superado, o que é uma obviedade 60 anos depois em relação à variedade e qualidade da produção do presente, Claussen conclui que este trabalho de falsificação eternizou-se, sobretudo, na estilização do clichê de “educadores elitistas”.

A razão disto repousa, de fato, naquele ambivalente sentimento alemão de admiração e inferioridade das novas gerações em relação ao influxo modernizador da América, pois, conclui, se Adorno e Horkheimer abandonaram a Alemanha como “intelectuais radicas de esquerda weimarianos, retornaram, como democratas e Aufklärer”.
O fato de que, como se afirmava à época, “os pessimistas estivessem em Nova York e os otimistas nos campos de concentração ou gulags”

significava neste “momento irracional”, ressalta Claussen, que a América não só lhes permitiu existencialmente sobreviver, mas lhes ofereceu uma “plataforma única do futuro social” com o “New Deal”, quando esta superou a Europa cultural e economicamente. O poder de prognóstico da Teoria Critica nasce, portanto, do futuro da América como sociedade global emergente, justamente de seu enraizamento nas mudanças desta sociedade e não da Alemanha, como Adorno reconheceu em 68:

“Nós nos desprovincializamos na América”, como “ponto avançado de observação”, sobretudo de uma nova estrutura universitária, isto é, a força da Teoria Crítica nasce justamente da inadequação de um modelo de crítica cultural conservadora diante da mudança radical e vertiginosa dos fundamentos sociais e sua nova metodologia. O resto é bobagem.

Velha Europa
Nada como uma boa aula de história. Mas, hoje, a velha cultura de esquerda Suhrkamp, o seu “momento de verdade”, sua possibilidade de mudar 1 mm de realidade, na Alemanha de 2010, esta cultura está morta e abaixo da camada de irídio do KT.

Quem sabe construam ainda uma mesquita diante do velho Instituto de Pesquisa Sociais.
Mas, sinceramente, surfando em abstrato naquele sugestivo “tsunami islâmico”, a quem interessa tudo isto? O futuro do passado da Teoria Crítica? Sinto-me com o uma criatura pré-histórica, prisioneiro da Guerra Fria e o ápice de minha vida não ocorreu na Alemanha ou em Frankfurt, mas na minha visita à Disneyworld

no ano do bicentenário da Independência, em 1976, diante do qual este museu se dissipa como a Casa de Usher com a ajuda dos “Ghostbusters”. O que sobrou do projeto social- democrata da “Teoria da Ação Comunicativa”?

Ela foi um obstáculo à carnificina dos Bálcãs, ou foram as bombas americanas e inglesas que puseram um ponto final na querela, já que alguém tem dar conta finalmente da faxina? Com o limbo dessa abstração humanista chamada “Europa”, que pariu ideologias assassinas como a mescla de nacionalismo e marxismo?

Quem está preocupado com o que virá depois do estado social, talvez o Califado, quando estivermos alguns palmos abaixo da superfície? O problema real não é a fantasia de uma Europa ou uma Alemanha demograficamente islâmicas, mas o pesadelo do tédio e irrelevância de seu presente, a autocomplacencia e arrogância da geriontocracia política de plantão, sua falta de imaginação, de juventude que vão dar a pá de cal na sociedade alemã.

A Alemanha vai cometer eutanásia muito antes das profecias de Sarrazin. Pelo menos neste aspecto, devemos a Donald Rumseld uma das categorias mais precisas sobre a atual geopolítica que atinge um nervo histórico fundamental: a “Velha Europa”, e ponha-se velha nisto, seu antiamericanismo visceral, sua ingratidão ao plano Marshall e pelo hiato da era de ouro do capitalismo.

Foi bom enquanto durou. Não deixa de ser saudoso, em retrospecto, pensando no racismo e maus hábitos de Sarkosy caçando ciganos, o curto período da terapia de choque aplicada por Geoge W. Bush aos seus velhos aliados,

pois se a América está também condenada a naufragar, na esteira do dólar que financia seu déficit interno, a “Velha Europa” também vai entrar pelo ralo no seu vácuo, com todas as pompas da retórica de seu passado esclarecido.
Enquanto isto, à sombra da “city” financeira do skyline de Frankfurt, o mundo brutalizado da subocupacao alemã prolonga esta agonia e assiste ao refluxo a relações paternalistas de poder.

Tribunais nos últimos anos humilham trabalhadores na perseguição de delitos de bagatelas, além do que a própria categoria de trabalho desmoralizou-se completamente por aqui. As livrarias são especializadas nestes títulos às dezenas: “O trabalho não compensa”, “Só os burros trabalham”, “Trabalho, nunca mais”. Paga-se para trabalhar na Alemanha.

Os alemães se vêem como prisioneiros de uma sociedade tecnocrática, sem nenhum debate substancial ou contraditório. Cinco anos depois do “Hartz IV”, a maior reforma social do pós-guerra, o país transformou-se numa gigantesca escola do fracasso humano, além de piorar, a cada dia, um dos sistemas educacionais mais injustos do mundo.

Segundo Robert Kurz, a Alemanha assumiu em definitivo, desde 2009, a ponta da subocupacao na Europa e sua peculiaridade como país é que, embora precise desesperadamente de mão de obra estrangeira qualificada, justamente programadores para manter seus conglomerados financeiros aqui em Frankfurt, não existe nenhuma possibilidade política de ela se assumir como tal. Se o decantado conceito de classe social já desaparecera como contraditório do horizonte histórico na época do crescimento, na anomia de hoje emerge em seu lugar a nova categoria do “Prekariat”, pessoas precárias, a inteligência acadêmica degradada e “africanizada” (Robert kurz) e, como Hannah Arendt nasceu a 100 metros de minha casa em Hannover, aquele tipo social Boer ressentido, oprimeiro branco Ocidental tratado no mesmo nível dos negros nos campos de concentração britânicos no Transvaal.

A casa de Hannah Arendt fica num dos maiores focos de pobreza da cidade, ponto de drogas, embriagados, justamente em frente ao Departamento Social na Lindener Marktplatz, onde a miséria sem nome de 13% da população faz fila pela ração diária.

Certamente, não ha comparação entre a Alemanha de Merkel e a apatia bovina de sua população, e a Franca racista de Sarkozy, nas quais os guetos têm uma virulência e dinâmica próprias, mas a oposição ainda é viva e cada boi atende por seu nome. Não há palavra ou discurso político para definir pobreza na Alemanha. Os especialistas são unânimes em admitir que essa anomia não tem “nenhum canal direto” de expressão partidária.
Acho uma grande pena, também, que a entrevista abaixo, realizada em outubro de 1999, durante a polêmica entre Habermas e Sloterdijk nunca houvesse sido publicada pelo antigo JB, que sequer existe mais. Na recuperação de meu material e do backup que venho realizando já faz cinco meses, disponibilizo este material que talvez tenha alguma utilidade para aqueles que ainda se ocupam da Teoria Crítica no Brasil, ou em algum recanto do universo, ou galáxia remota em que se fale português, como se fosse um Chevrolet 58 novinho em folha.

No meu site Urânia, que logo logo somente irá veicular material Astrofísica, o tempo não passa, como na velocidade da luz. Aqui não tem ontem, anteontem ou amanhã. Acho este anacronismo uma licença poética da natureza. Nossa perecepção e consciência não conseguem compreender, por exemplo, que para a CMBR, a radição fossíl que se segue à inflação, não se passou nenhum segundo, enquanto para nós já existem 14 bilhões de anos-luz do horizonte de visibilidade. De qualquer maneira, Detlev Claussen foi, é e sempre será um dos mais brilhantes especialistas em Theodor Adorno e tenho um enorme orgulho de tê-lo conhecido nesta vida e era geológica, mesmo que já estivesse naquela época exorcizando em mim todos os fantasmas da velha Teoria Crítica e me recolhendo, como um velho velociráptor ao túmulo abaixo da camada de irídio. O Instituto de Hannover fora fundado por egressos do antigo Instituto de Pesquisa Social em Frankfurt em meados dos sessenta, entre os quais Oskar Negt, também aluno de Adorno, amigo e conselheiro do ex-Chanceler Gehard Schröder. As ilustrações a seguir são minha homenagem mais profunda, carinhosa e sincera a tudo que aprendi ao longo da vida com a Teoria Crítica.

O que é verdadeiro e o que é falso na polêmica em torno de Sloterdijk? O que foi superado e o que ainda resiste como o núcleo de verdade da Teoria Crítica? O mandarinato de Jürgen Habermas teria acabado?

Detlev Claussen - Esta pergunta, na verdade, deve ser respondida em três etapas distintas. Comecemos, então, com a primeira. Os debates nos folhetins e nos programas culturais televisivos na Alemanha nos últimos quinze anos caracterizam-se, particularmente, pelo peso regulador central do passado e dizem respeito à auto-compreensão e à identidade da República Federal. Podemos dizer que este ciclo de debates, que começou em meados dos anos oitenta, teve como marco inaugural a “Polêmica dos Historiadores” (“Historikerstreit”). Não se tratava naquele momento de distingüir o “certo” do “errado”, mas justamente de definir a posição da República Federal diante de seu passado e de uma necessidade de “Esclarecimento”, em sentido amplo, pois geralmente no contexto destas polêmicas pensa-se apenas em distinguir o certo do errado, mas não é assim. Em todos os debates na Alemanha esta questão sempre está presente: quando se trata do passado, o debate acaba assumindo uma função legitimadora diante do presente, ou, poderíamos dizer ex-negativo, como aquela Alemanha do nacional-socialismo, que há cinquenta anos ameaçava o mundo, distingue-se desta Alemanha, membro das Nações Unidas, signatária da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos e membro da Nato. Este é apenas um dos aspectos dos debates para a auto-compreensão da Republica Federal Um outro aspecto desta questão é que existe uma forte corrente na Alemanha que acredita que se deva dar um basta definitivo à questão do passado, que esta pauta deve ser encerrada para sempre e que, na verdade, ela é sempre utilizada com o intuito de enfraquecer a posição da Alemanha e diminuí-la diante do mundo.

Trata-se, então, portanto daquela "produção permanente de inimigos do Estado ou de imagens inimigas", nas palavras de Heiner Mueller, justamente agora que o Império do Mal e o socialismo não existem mais, para manter o aparelho folhetinesco em movimento?

Detlev Claussen - Sim, em parte, acho que isto está ocorrendo. Pelo menos são sempre discussões da mídia. Há tempos atrás era muito pior: os inimigos de Estado eram caçados na rua.

Desde que a revista “Focus” (especie de “Isto É” concorrente da “Veja” ) apareceu há sete anos, puxando para baixo o nível da “Der Spiegel”, houve também uma verdadeira revolução na mídia alema para atingir o nivel mais baixo, o que tinha a ver também com o esvaziamento da esfera cultural dos últimos anos da coolizão de Kohl.

Detlev Claussen - Voce tem inteiramente razão nesta questão da queda nível. Se quiseremos entender a mídia, perceberemos, então, que no debate de Sloderjik está havendo a desmontagem dos mecanismos mistificatórios do jornal, neste caso, do “Die Zeit”,

ironicamente, trata-se da desmontagem de um jornal sério. O “Die Zeit” é uma verdadeira instituição na Alemanha já ha quarenta anos, e perceba, trata-se de um jornal fundamental para a compreensão da classe média alemã agonizante, o “Novo Centro”, propagado pelo coalizão que levou Schröder ao poder. Ele era um jornal bastante conservador na década de cinqüenta, depois mudou radicalmente com a virada de mentalidade deste centro pela revolução no sistema educacional nos anos sessenta, quando então ele passa a se compreender como um jornal de centro-esquerda de tendência neoliberal.

Todas estas tipificações estão desaparecendo agora. Vamos fazer um trocadilho, espero que voce consiga traduzi-lo em português: as pessoas não têm mais tempo (“Zeit”) de ler “O Tempo” (“Die Zeit”). Eu mesmo não tenho tempo de ler o “Die Zeit”, e com esta mesma ironia, diria que este jornal enorme com textos enormes, mais parece um deserto cinzento de letras muito pequenas, onde a opinião de poucos autores tenta ser esclarecida em muitas páginas. Isto acabou, esse também é um escandalo do jornal “Die Zeit”, no sentido da perda de tempo que a polêmica implica, do tempo vital que esta polêmica está nos tomando para discussões reais. Em princípio, esta polêmica jamais teria partido de uma editoria de política de qualquer jornal alemão. O discurso de Sloterdijk foi um típico discurso como centenas de outros que acontecem todos os dias nas dezenas de Colóquios que se proliferam na Alemanha, com um tom provocatório, é claro, mas nele não foi dito nada de importante, trata-se de um discurso, em principio, desinteressante.

Mas o que Sloterdijk declara sobre Habermas não é desinteressante, a estridência do tom: Habermas seria um “jacobino”, protagonista de uma campanha de terror contra a sua pessoa, espalhando boatos sem procurar discutir com ele diretamente, de acordo com as regras da “Teoria da Ação Comunicativa”.

Detlev Claussen - Isto é uma tremenda besteira de Sloterdijk. É evidente que o discurso, seja ele qual for, é sempre sobre "alguém". Além disso, Habermas não tem absolutamente nada que discutir com Sloterdijk. Trata-se de uma asneira afirmar que, apenas porque alguém o criticou, a Teoria Crítica esteja morta na pessoa de Habermas. Isto é um absurdo, é um escândalo lógico, mas se trata, neste caso, de algo completamente diferente e tentarei ainda chegar a esta questão. Por um lado, existe na Alemanha uma imensa insatisfação no status quo intelectual que acaba sendo canalizada para a mídia. Isto tem a ver também com as modificações que ocorreram na Alemanha nos ultimos dez anos na esfera pública. Estas mudanças ocorreram à revelia da posição e do papel dos intelectuais diante da midia. Aconteceu outra coisa na verdade: a vida politica é determinada por outras regras que não as regras dos folhetins, ou seja, os folhetins são alimentados por grandes debates e grandes escândalos, enquanto a vida política, na verdade, não se pauta por esta medida. Isto tem a ver com aquilo que eu abordava inicialmente a respeito da “Polêmica dos Historiadores”.

Esta polêmica foi desencadeada, porque havia um grupo de intelectuais de penetração na mídia, ou que buscavam na época um papel na mídia e se sentiam frustrados pela dissolução da coalizão liberal por um regime de direita como o de Kohl. Eles desejavam aquilo que, à época, propagava-se como uma “mudança espiritual moral”, já, na própria expressão, uma idéia abominável. E isto, na verdade, era o que aquele governo não queria de forma alguma, pois não tinha nada a ver com seu estofo intelectual. Este processo era paralelo também à nova orientação da revolução conservadora nos EUA àquela epoca com a “Reganomics”. Mas a classe média Alemanha, também, não desejava uma mudança radical e, sim, uma acomodação a este processo, como esta revolução conservadora já apontava no epílogo da Guerra Fria. E agora trata-se exatamente de uma constelação contrária: com a mudanca de governo para uma coalização de centro-esquerda, estes intelectuais desejam uma mudanca radical e não mais uma acomodação como antes, o que leva necessariamente a uma enorme insatisfação, pois o resultado da poltica deste governo é irrelevante diante das promessas de campanha e das mudanças estruturais esperadas.

As expectativas do eleitorado são sempre maiores que as personagens políticas podem realizar. Por outro lado, depois do fim da Guerra Fria, os assuntos intelectuais dos folhetins tornaram-se um tédio absoluto, não interessam a mais ninguém, pois as pessoas se interessam pelos problemas do presente e não por disputas ideológicas. Daí a necessidade de “escândalos” fabricados a fim de que as pessoas voltem novamente a se interessar por estes folhetins, senão, como afirmei, é absolutamente tedioso folheá-los, pois o comunismo morreu há muito tempo, e ninguém neste mundo mais agüenta ler pela enésima vez por que o comunismo fracassou.Chances reduzidas para Vigo conseguir o "greencard"

Mas esta universidade das assim chamadas "Humanidades" também se tornou absolutamente desinteressante. Como o Sr. afirmou no último Colóquio Internacional sobre o Passado o Presente da Teoria Crítica realizado aqui em Hannover, esta terminologia frankfurtiana já pertence a "qualquer conversa de botequim". Sloterdijk é um forasteiro diante da máquina universitária e por isso se veja no direito de declarar Habermas um cadáver acadêmico. Não só a Teoria Crítica teria morrido como "ideologia acadêmica", mas a própria universidade em suas Humanidades tradicionais.

Detlev Claussen - Isto não ele não disse. Temos que deixar claro do que estamos falando. Veja bem, em primeiro lugar, que isto fique bem claro, nós estamos falando da Teoria Crítica, que é um objeto, uma vertente teórica complexa de varias tendências; segundo, Habermas é uma pessoa. Habermas tem uma relação muito complicada com a Teoria Crítica, mas Jürgen Habermas não é a Teoria Crítica! Erro número um de Sloterdijk.

Terceiro, quando pensamos no que de fato a Teoria Crítica significa para a República Federal da Alemanha, acredita-se, muitas vezes que ela seja teoria dominante da esfera pública, o que é absurdo, isto nunca aconteceu! Habermas desempenhou na esfera pública nos últimos vintes anos um grande papel, mas isto é uma coisa completamente distinta do que seja a Teoria Crítica. A maioria das pessoas identifica a Teoria Crítica com a Escola de Frankfurt, o Instituto de Pesquisa Social e Jürgen Habermas. Isto não é verdade, trata-se de uma simplicação grosseira. A Teoria Crítica foi fundada por Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock nos anos anos vinte, suas formulações ganham corpo nos anos trinta, mas seu peso decisivo manifesta-se apenas nos anos quarenta.

Neste processo, ela foi definindo seus objetos específicos e seu campo interdisciplinar e ganhando uma autonomia de seus protagonistas originais. Deveria estar claro a Sloterdjik que Adorno já morreu há trinta anos. Os fundadores da Teoria Crítica estão mortos há muito tempo, isto é verdade, mas aqueles que se ocupam dela ainda hoje não estão e seu conteúdo modificado não está morto, pelo contrário, releva uma atualidade espantosa. O que é central para definir a Teoria Crítica?

A Teoria Crítica foi a primeira teoria que pensou o que de fato Auschwitz significa para a História Mundial, ela foi a primeira a formular Auschwitz como catástrofe civilizatória nos anos quarenta. Também é um elemento constitutivo para a Teoria Crítica, o que muitos críticos ignoram, o desenvolvimento do socialismo na URSS e sua bancarrota. Ela se denomina “Teoria Critica” em oposição à vulgata marxista estalinista. Este grande nivelamento da literatura em expressões como “Marxismo Ocidental” não confere com a realidade. Ela constitui seus objetos próprios. Em terceiro lugar, o que parece ter permanecido sempre à margem naqueles que se ocuparam com ela e com o qual Habermas também se ocupou: o que estas duas catástrofes civilizatórias, Auschwitz e o goulag sovietico significaram para o Terceiro Mundo nos anos sessenta. Geralmente ninguém estabelece este parentesco, mas este foi um elemento essencial na época, senão o Instituto não teria convido Witzvogel, que se ocupava com a China para participarde suas pesquisas. Geralmente se afirma que a Teoria Crítica é eurocentrica, mas ela também procurava entender no conjunto do sistema do Capital, por que se desenvolveram processos revolucionários em sociedades que não realizaram uma modernização burguesa.

A teoria de Marx era uma Teoria Crítica da sociedade burguesa e não de uma sociedade pré-burguesa como a Rússia czarista.

Este complexo de catástrofes do assim chamado progresso burguês e da modernização são o objeto da Teoria Crítica e implicam diretamente o Terceiro Mundo. Estes problemas são atuais ainda hoje e mantem sua relevancia. Agora temos o segundo Ponto. Quem é Jurgen Habermas. Habermas chegou a Frankfurt nos anos cinquenta e foi durante um tempo assistente do Instituto de Pesquisa Social. Então Habermas desenvolveu uma reflexão diferenciada e houve uma conhecida ruptura com Horkheimer. Habermas deixa Frankfurt e somente retornará mais tarde como professor com Adorno. Eu estudei nesta época em Frankfurt. No início dos setenta, Habermas sai de Frankfurt e se instala perto de Munique e lá desenvolvera uma teoria própria a Teoria da Ação Comunicativa. Quando comparamos o conteúdo da Teoria da Ação Comunicativa com o da Teoria Crítica, elas se diferenciam em traços essenciais. Pode-se dizer, paradoxalmente, que Habermas fez carreira alardeando justamente a tese que Sloterdjik hoje defende, a saber, que a Teoria Crítica esteja morta. Viva a Teoria da Ação Comunicativa! Podemos tomar como exemplo o prefácio de Habermas de 1982 à “Dialética do Esclarecimento”, o texto central da Teoria Crítica, onde ele afirma que este aquele é um livro completamente superado ao manter o acento negro da modernidade que impregnava os anos quarenta. A Teoria da Ação Comunicativa parte do presuposto de que a Teoria Crítica esteja morta e superada. Mas a Teoria da Ação Comunicativa é uma outra teoria completamente distinta que não tem nada a ver com a Teoria Crítica para “superá-la”. Então Habermas retorna mais uma vez a Frankfurt nos oitenta e aí se estabelece finalmente esta simplificação de que ele seja o “herdeiro” da Teoria Crítica, não obstante Adorno já estivese morto há mais de dez anos. Esta identificação entre Teoria Crítica e a pessoa de Habermas e aquilo que se fazia em Frankfurt passa então a ser um clichê internacional, mas de fato, são três processos distintos. O Instituto de Pesquisa Social havia sido criado há setenta e cinco anos como um Instituto semi-privado. Por quê? Este detalhe é extremamente importante. Ele somente poderia ser fundado fora da tradição academica alemã. Somente poderia ser financiado com capital privado.

Com capital de um empresário argentino.

Perfeito, de um empresário radicado em Buenos Aires, isto foi muito importante e o Estado prussiano de Hessen ficou muito feliz, pois naquele época os alemães não tinham dinheiro, o Estado era muito pobre e lá estavam dois professores à disposição. Daí surgiu também um compromisso, mas isto significa também que nos anos vinte o Instituto de Pesquisa Social estava à margem da Universidade e não no centro, o que determinaria o estatuto conceitual de seus participantes: um pensamento que vem da margem para o centro. Nos anos trinta, o Instituto será transferido numa complicada operação triangular entre Berna e Paris para Nova Iorque. Ele será recriado novamente nos anos cinqüenta na Alemanha sob uma constelação favorável do governo de Hessen, que apoiou este processo para trazer de volta à Alemanha as forças acadêmicas anti-fascistas no exilio. As pessoas geralmente silenciam sobre isto e se esquecem de um fato capital: a universidade alemã da República de Weimar era extremamente autoritária e Frankfurt era um caso especial em função de suas tradições liberais. As universidades eram altamente reacionárias e se inclinaram rapidamente para o nacional-socialismo. Um dos primeiros prédios a serem ocupados pelos estudantes nazistas depois da tomada do poder em 1933 foi o do Instituto. O Instituto era a “cidadela vermelha”. A história da universidade alemã neste seculo é também a história de uma grande miséria intelectual. As universidades eram, de fato, o ninho da reação. Se hoje sempre identificamos a universidade ao campo da esquerda, é preciso se lembrar de que esta mudança de eixo processou-se apenas durante os sessenta, quando o sistema de ensino foi inteiramente reformulado. Mas mesmo assim a Teoria Critica permanecia também à margem na paisagem universitária alemã depois de seu retorno do exílio. Precisamos isto deixar claro. Nos anos cinquenta, os politicos de Hessen procuravam trazer de volta estes imigrantes, porque na universidade alemã não havia um potencial antifascista para alavancar a instituição. Desta forma, Adorno e Horkheimer retornaram à Alemanha para reconstruir o Instituto. Mas se por um lado o Instituto durante o período em que eles estiveram em sua direção foi modelado na figura de suas personalidades, por outro, ele estava também integrado a uma universidade e seus mecanismos de recrurtação. Neste processo constitutivo, institucional ele se converte também no departamento de uma universidade. Mas retornando ao pontode origem: esta indiferenciação presente na opinião publica entre Instituto de Pesquisa Social, Escola de Frankfurt, Teoria Critíca e Jürgen Habermas não é verdadeira, são quatro instâncias completamente distintas.

A denominação Escola de Frankfurt é uma designação que vem de fora. Horkheimer e Adorno nunca quiseram constituir uma escola de pensamento, mas um núcleo interdisciplinar de debates sociológicos, atuante como na “Disputa do positivismo” no início dos sessenta. A “Disputa do Positivismo” tratava do papel da metodologia na pesquisa social e da lá se originou uma escola de pesquisa social como a de Colônia, que, então, para se diferenciar do núcleo de Frankfurt, denomina-a de Escola de Frankfurt. Nunca houve, portanto, a assim chamada “Escola de Frankfurt”. Quando falamos sobre uma teoria, quando falamos a sério sobre estas coisas, temos de falar dos objetos materiais de uma teoria, e não de um teatro pessoal e tampouco da pessoa Jürgen Habermas. A Teoria Crítica não é algo acabado, uma doutrina, mas uma tarefa do pensamento, portanto, esta frase bombástica “a Teoria Crítica está morta” é complemente idiota. O que Sloterdijk faz , bem com a resposta de Habermas é um jogo pessoal para a midia: “Estou aqui e voce deve falar comigo”, mas para quem se interesse seriamente por problemas teóricos e pretende ainda manter uma atitude de cientista social trata-se sempre de objetos e não de pessoas. Talvez pareça pouco habitual o que vou afirmar:

Habermas e Sloterdjik assemelham-se bastante ao superestimar o valor da teoria para os processos sociais. Em princípio, o que Sloterdijk fez foi tentar provocar Habermas, pois ele pretende assumir o papel de Habermas, e o pior e menos sério no episódio é a participação de um jornal como o “Die Zeit”. Este é o lado aborrecido desta história. Há quatro semanas atrás, quem quisesse saber o que estava acontecendo no mercado editorial na Alemanha teria até dificuldades em soletrar o nome de Sloterdijk, pois o seu último livro “Esferas 1” estava encalhado. Ninguém consegue ler um livro intragável como este, não sei se você o leu, mas é um amontoado de pensamentos confusos de segunda mão que se pretende passar por filosofia. Isto não podemos censurar em Habermas: uma teoria séria não pode ser desacreditada por este baixo nível. Mas aqui se trata de outra coisa, do papel de Habermas na República Federal. Na Teoria Crítica original, é um momento constitutivo reconhecer o conteúdo de verdade temporal dos objetos, isto é, a tarefa programática de compreender o tempo, a mudança do Espírito do Tempo para criticá-lo e não idolatrá-lo como Hegel. Mas com a “Critica”, com esta teoria não podemos chegar ao “mainstream” do Espírito do Tempo. Algo inteiramente outro ocorre na Teoria da Ação Comunicativa. A estratégia da Teoria da Ação Comunicativa era se atrelar ao mercado acadêmico mundial e nele sobreviver. Um ponto essencial desta acoplagem foi o assim chamado “lingustic turn”. Porém, quando eu realizo o “linguistic turn”, sou obrigado então a declarar a Teoria Crítica como morta e acabada: a dialética, a filosofia da consciência são besteiras do passado, conceitos fora de moda!. Não existe Teoria Crítica sem dialética do esclarecimento. Este é o ponto essencial. Habermas liqüidou materialmente a Teoria Crítica com sua Teoria da Ação Comunicativa através do “linguistic turn”. Somente podemos tocar a Teoria Crítica como algo vivo quando consideramos que o “linguistc turn” é apenas conjuntura da ciência mundial, mas não a sua última palavra. Pode haver um pensamento além deste “lingustic turn” que seja significativo. Nem todos devem ser obrigados a participar desta guinada. Este é um ponto de vista importante, somente então podemos continuar a Teoria Crítica. Teoria Crítica com “linguistic turn” é a Teoria da Ação Comunicativa com outras teorias. Mas este não e todo Jürgen Habermas. Este é apenas a metade. O primeiro é o Jürgen Habermas cientista, o filósofo que quer constituir uma escola do pensamento como a Teoria da Ação Comunicativa. Adorno e Horkheimer não queriam constituir qualquer escola, não desejevam mais ser filósofos no sentido tradicional, pois, frisemos bem este detalhe, a experiência social concreta desempenha um papel decisivo na Teoria Crítica. Na teoria de Habermas a experiência social desempenha um papel marginal. Trata-se de uma diferenca enorme. Portanto, Habermas tem de afirmar que a “Dialética do Esclarecimento” está impregnada do horizonte espiritual de Auschwitz e do goulag, que hoje não teria mais qualquer significado, pois temos de olhar para o futuro. É um diferenca gigantesca. Ele é um outro tipo de intelectual que Horkheimer e Adorno. Por um lado, temos o cientista sério no “mainstream” do “linguistc turn” e, de outro lado um intelectual político na esfera publica que assume permanentemente posições. E isto foi incialmente algo novo na Alemanha, relativamente novo, pois desde os anos vinte tínhamos a tradição dos cientistas intelectuais apolíticos que davam sustentação ao sistema na República de Weimar, no Nazismo e depois na RDA, intelectuais apolíticos. Habermas quebrou esta tradição e pagou um preço bem alto por isso. Ele impregnou seu pensamento filosófico por conteúdos políticos, aparecendo sempre na esfera pública com esta ambigüidade do político e do filósofo de modo contrário a Horkheimer e Adorno. Estes sempre apareciam com uma unica posição, em outras palavras, a Teoria Crítica, ja era uma posição política. A Teoria da Ação Comunicativa pretende-se cientifica, enquanto que a velha Teoria Critca não é ciencia, ela se orienta criticamente em direção à ciencia,mas ela é “crítica” (“Kritik”). Nem tudo que a comunidade científica reputa como bom a Teoria Crítica pode aceitar, mas antes criticar, pois ela pretende justamente refletir sobre o papel da ciencia na sociedade. Isto leva a uma mudanca de “mainstream” e faz da Teoria Critica um “outsider”. Esta guinada colocaria Habermas então no “mainstream” com sua Teoria da Ação Comunicativa. Politicamente, Habermas sempre apareceu diante da opinião publica como um intelectual engajado. Talvez devêssemos traduzir para um público brasieiro o que significa “intelectual apolitico” na Alemanha: publicamente apolítico, mas no campo privado um bom conservador. Este papel caía como uma mão na luva durante a Guerra Fria. Desta maneira, Habermas aparece ambiguamente como uma figura de esquerda, teoricamente pertencente ao “mainstream” teórico, politicamente engajado. Esta é a situação complexa da figura ambígua de Habermas. Mas agora temos um outro ponto. Habermas sempre compareceu ao debate como um crítico das tradições alemas e daí decorre sua função e desta forma, ele articularia a crítica daquilo que na Republica Federal nos anos sessenta era a rápida modernização ou a americanização da República Federal, que marginalizava as tradições alemãs. A República Federal a Alemanha não era mais tão alemã quanto se pretendia. Em muitos aspectos, ela teria se americanizado. Mas estas são apenas palavras para um processo que não e outra coisa senão a modernização.Quando consideramos a questão do ponto de vista teórico, temos de entender que a modernização seria o desatrelamento da República Federal de suas tradições autoritárias, o que não é um milgare mundial, não significa apenas uma mudança de atitude intelectual, mas é um procersso decorrente de mudanças profundas no sistema social do “Welfare State” e da universalização do consumo que dissolve as distinções de tradicionais de classe social.

Mas as figuras clássicas de uma crítica cultural conservadora retornam mais uma vez como um fantasma em vários intelectuais de peso, à direita ou à esquerda Este consenso crítico teria acabado.

Detlev Claussen - Não, esta idéia do “consenso” também é uma idéia de Habermas, este consenso nunca existitu. Vamos deixar isto bem claro. Adorno e Horkheimer eram muitos conhecidos na Alemanha, mas sempre foram até sua morte “outsiders”. Até hoje a maioria das pesoas não entendeu o que significa a frase “escrever poesia depois de Auschwitz é barbarie”.Ela é sempre citada da maneira incorrreta. Até hoje as pessoas protestam contra esta frase porque eles não a entenderam em absoluto o que foi dito.

Os mais novos riem deste “pathos” retórico de Adorno, o que se articula com ele hoje?

Detlev Claussen - Se riem e porque talvez não tenham entendido nada. As pessoas não sabem sequer do que ele trata muitas vezes, esta dificuldade estilística é chave em Adorno. Se riem é porque não entenderam sequer do que se trata. Na minha opinião isto não pode ser uma questão geracional. Fiz muito seminários sobre esta temática, e não faço para meus alunos da Teoria Critica uma doutrina. Procuro chegar à coisa mesma.

Há dois momentos chaves e bem distintos da recepção da Teoria Crítica no Brasil. Há um momento inicial mais impregando por Marcuse no final dos sessenta e início dos setenta, que poderíamos até chamar de contracultural e haverá um outro momento benjaminiano nos anos oitenta, em que Benjamin explode como best seller acadêmico e passa a ser lido como uma espécie de santo doméstico de uma história da catástrofe da qual somos o testemunho. Benjamin passa a ser a confirmação da nossa barbárie local, do fracasso e da chave de um “outra história” que tem muito a ver com o messianismo sebastianista e católico de nossa tradição. Especialmente com a “Dialética do Esclarecimento” e Adorno esta idéia de uma confirmação na barbárie leva a uma leitura anacrônica do livro, anacronismo que se inscreve como uma dimensao estrutural da obra, mas aqui trata se de um leitura anacrônica como se ele fosse a descrição do presente. Kogève leu a as figuras da “Fenomenoligia” de Hegel como uma confirmação do presente. Como é possível lê-lo sem aqueles pressupostos que o motivaram? Na propria RDA o livro teve um papel geracional decisivo como uma chave de compreensão do colapso do socialismo, um processo de secularização intelectual.

Detlev Claussen - Toda recepção verdadeira começa por uma falsificação e modificação qualitativa de seu objeto.Quando li a “Dialética do Esclarecimento” em 1966, fiquei absolutamente fascinado como ela podia me descrever como se pode chegar a esta escala de catástrofes, mas para compreender estas catástrofes é preciso o trabalho de gerações. Há trinta anos trabalho no sentido de entender estas catástrofes que estão pressupostas na “Dialética do Esclarecimento” e o que elas de fato significam. As pessoas podem até dizer que ela não tenha mais nada a ver com nosso presente, mas trata-se de uma avaliação muito superficial. Temos de olhar com muita clareza e atenção a estrutura do livro, pois na “Dialética do Esclarecimento” não aparecem diretamente os elementos que são os seus verdadeiros pressupostos.

Eles não estão lá. Trata-se de “fragmentos filosóficos”, isto é, fragmentos de um todo que não é dado, e este conjunto tem de ser investigado ja que ele não é e nem pode ser completamente desenvolvido no livro, mas temos de ter uma consciência deste conjunto. Quem lê a “Dialética do Esclarecimento e não tem em vista precisamente que se passava nos anos vinte e não apenas na Europa, mas também nos Terceiro Mundo, não entende o que ela significa, e pode pensar talvez que seus autores sejam mal humorados. Tenho aqui em minha mao um livro fino de 260 paginas que me traz fragmentos do pensamento sobre catástrofes que não caberiam em 10.000, 100.000 páginas, temos apenas fragementos dela. Foi apenas entao que compreendi este livro tão belo e bem escrito, como um desafio ao trabalho, não como um receituario de sabedoria, um desafio ao trabalho. Lá está a questao: por que eu sinto estas coisas como catástrofes e quanto de realidade esta descrição pode me devolver. Aquele que compreende a realidade brasileira do presente como uma parte destas catástrofes mundiais do Capital, mas também como fragmento de um outro, este compreendeu o livro de fato. Ironicamente a este livro da modernidade foi escrito num dos lugares mais bonitos do mundo, sena costa dourada californiana. Naquela paisagem banhada pelo Sol, o Sol da racionalidade se insinue a suposição de que o mundo pode ser belo como o paraiso terreno, mas neste paraíso se esconde o próprio inferno, sob cuja superficie desenvolvem-se catástrofes inomináveis.

Então consigo recuperar este todo ao qual ela alude através do trabalho conceitual de mediação, isto e, não posso identificar tudo como um catástrofe. Adorno e Horkheimer não dizem isto. Preciso olhar o conjunto e suas fissuras. Precisamos de quarenta ou trinta anos para compreender o que estas catástrofes realmente significam. No anos cinquenta as pessoas ainda não haviam compreendido o exato siginficado e a dimensao de Auschwitz , não poque eles fossem caracteres fracos, mas porque é quase impossível entender de fato a real dimensao de Auschwitz. Naturalmente há uma diferença entre a situação de 1940 na Califórnia e a nossa.

Mas temos, no entando, que pegar este mosaico e ler através dele esta diferença. Não podemos entender a lógica hegeliana sem a Revolução Francesa, e cintando o exemplo de Kogève que você mencionou, existem diferenças essenciais entre a situação de Senhor e Escravo na “Fenomenologia do Espirito” e aquele que Franz Fanon descreve em “ Os Condenados da Terra”, como há diferença entre Mocambique e a Argélia. Para que realizemos esta dialética, temos também de errar. Sim, acho problemático quando as pessoas lêem algo como uma descrição ou “confirmação” do presente. De onde vem a falsa aparência para que eu me reconheça novamente neste processo? Existem por um lado conexões reais e existe uma diferença. Quando tenho ambas, somente então compreendi a diferença.