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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Latin America’s scientific ‘magic’

28 May 2015
Taken from the May 2015 issue of Physics World

Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America Ed. Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques and Christina Holmes 2014 MIT Press £24.95/$35.00pb 410pp

Island secrets

 

Latin America is a diverse continent, interconnected by its common Iberian heritage. Its pre-Columbian societies were quite sophisticated, as can be seen in the Teotihuacan pyramids (see “The pyramid detectives” December 2014 pp24–27) near Mexico City, or the remains of the city of Machu Picchu in Peru, or even by a visit to the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Colombia. Nevertheless, this part of the world always has, nowadays, the adjective “developing” associated with it, or even (at least until recently) the politically unsavoury term “underdeveloped”.

Beyond Imported Magic explores the science, technology and society of the Latin American countries in a collection of essays. Its title seems to be inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’ wonderful novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and its magical-realist set-up, but upon reading the opening remarks of the editors, I found that it actually refers to the way that engineering students in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s supposedly talked about computers as “imported magic”. Since I was a student in São Paulo at that time, it strikes me as quite improbable that this was the case. Nevertheless, one of the book’s editors (and the author of the introduction), Ivan da Costa Marques, is well known in Brazil for leading an attempt to set up a computer industry there. After a period in government, private industry and state industry, he came back to academia, focusing his interest on the interactions of science, technology and society. One presumes, therefore, that he knows what he is talking about.

The essays in this book are written by (and for) sociologists of science who have an interest in Latin America, rather than for scientists. They cover a wide array of topics, ranging from provocative subjects such as “Who invented Brazil?” (a title taken from a famous carnival samba lyric), to accounts of scientific expeditions that brought medical care to isolated populations and studied unknown diseases. It was on one such expedition that Chagas disease, which affects many of the poorest populations in the world, was identified. Another essay describes the invention, in late 19th-century Argentina, of fingerprinting as a tool to help solve criminal cases.

Two of the essays touch directly on the role of physicists in the promotion of nuclear energy in Argentina and Mexico, and by extension in Brazil as well. The first – entitled “Bottling atomic energy in Argentina” – describes how, in 1951, Juan Perón, the charismatic president of Argentina, announced at a press conference the success of Proyecto Huemul. This was an atomic fusion research programme that would, he claimed, bring cheap energy to every household in the country. The improbable character behind this announcement was an Austrian-German physicist called Ronald Richter, who had done his research on an isolated island in a gorgeous Andean lake, just across from the city of Bariloche. The amount of money invested in Richter’s enterprise is estimated to have been around $150m at today’s prices, but the whole operation came apart when a group led by another physicist, José A Balseiro, used concealed gamma-ray detectors to reveal the fraudulent nature of the project’s experiments.

That a programme like Proyecto Huemul could have been supported, despite the solid tradition of physics already present in Argentina at the time, is a reflection of a phenomenon seen again and again in Latin America, whereby populist leaders such as Perón tend to distrust their countries’ scientific establishments. But the article points out that despite the disaster of this enterprise, it nevertheless became the seed of what is now one of the most productive research centres in physics in Latin America: the Instituto Balseiro, a top-class research and educational establishment that lies just across the channel separating the island and Bariloche.

The book’s other essay on nuclear energy is “Peaceful atoms in Mexico”. Written by Edna Suaréz-Díaz and Gisela Mateos – two historians of science based in Mexico – it emphasizes the role that programmes such as Atoms for Peace (an initiative by US president Dwight D Eisenhower) had in establishing nuclear activity in Latin America. It also highlights how physicists worked to encourage the establishment of peaceful nuclear research in Mexico. In particular, the main force behind the Mexican effort was Manuel Sandoval-Vallarta, a physicist who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before the Second World War and is best known for identifying the effect of latitude on the flux of cosmic rays.

Suaréz-Díaz and Mateos argue that the distinctive feature of the Mexican nuclear programme was its civil, non-military character, in contrast to the Argentinian and Brazilian programmes. To me, though, this distinction seems to be exaggerated. While it is true that the Brazilian Navy was interested in developing nuclear submarines for defensive purposes, there was never any serious attempt there to develop nuclear armaments. Also, both the Argentinian and the Brazilian nuclear programmes were actually developed by civilian institutions: the CNEA (Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica) in Argentina and CNEN (Comissão Nacional para Energia Nuclear) in Brazil.

Further evidence of the pacifist character of the use of nuclear energy in this part of the world is shown by the Tlatelolco Treaty, which forbids nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean and was signed by all the countries in the region. In addition to this treaty, Argentina and Brazil have an even more stringent agreement for mutual verification of all nuclear facilities, one that came about after strong pressure from the physics communities of both countries.

The essays in Beyond Imported Magic focus mainly on frustrated attempts to develop science and technology in the Latin American continent. But while it is true that many such attempts have fallen short, the book fails to recognize the immense advances that the region has seen, in part as an indirect consequence of peaceful nuclear-energy initiatives. One result of cross-border collaboration on nuclear science was the creation, in 1962, of the international Centro Latino Americano de Física (CLAF) under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The CLAF came about after the First Latin American School of Physics, an initiative by three leading figures in the region (Juan José Giambiagi from Argentina, José Leite Lopes from Brazil and Marcos Moshinsky from Mexico) that influenced a whole generation of Latin American physicists. Today, the CLAF remains very active in promoting co-operation among the Latin American countries and giving support to initiatives to establish physics facilities in the region.

Physics research is also linked with other Latin American success stories. Brazil is home to a very successful aircraft manufacturer, Embraer, which is smaller only than Boeing and Airbus. The boom in agrobusiness in Brazil has been supported by research conducted at EMBRAPA, a company that is developing ways to improve the productivity of Brazilian agriculture; one of EMBRAPA’s main research centres (located in São Carlos, in the state of São Paulo) is dedicated to the application of physics to agriculture. But regardless of whether the focus is on “atoms for peace” or on “atoms for peas”, physics in Latin America has been much more than “imported magic” for many decades now. I wish this book had done more to reflect that.

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