Professor of Physics at Universidad de Costa Rica
Room 108 Physics Dept. Bldg.
(+506) 2511-6600
Twitter: @ManuComplexity
Today more than ever, a strong liaison between science and the humanities is urgently needed. In our current, complex society we need scientists and humanities' scholars to know more about each other's work. The old approach to solving problems no longer holds, and the increasing defunding of social sciences and humanities in universities around the world only makes things worse.
For the last 10 years, our group has been developing activities to foster such a liaison. In this way, we have worked with colleagues and students from within and outside academia to create a work of literary fiction based on the interplay between science and art; we have produced a book on Costa Rican Traditional Knowledge; we have collaborated interdisciplinarily with historians on the cultural aspects of black hole physics, and on how Stephen Hawking's worldview was informed by his physical disability -- signaling thus the importance of cognitive diversity. We have also solved linguistics problems using complexity ideas; crafted and taught courses for music, architecture, literature and anthropology majors, showed a deaf person how to understand the sound of a French horn and also how to play it, helped to craft a Lucretian Oath (similar to a Hippocratic Oath) for physicists, and we plan to build a high quality marimba tuned to a non-Western Sléndro scale, the first of its kind once it is produced.
Biographical
Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez obtained his PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford (2002) working with Robert Wagoner on high energy astrophysics. He also got a PhD Minor in Anthropological Sciences working with James Fox. His undergraduate and Master's degrees in Physics were obtained at Universidad de Costa Rica (1992, 1994).
Research interests
Acoustics, high energy and black hole astrophysics, interplay between science and art, history of science and diversity, complex systems.
Books
Costa Rican Traditional Knowledge According to Local Experiences, with Hugo Solís-Sánchez (Eds.). Springer, 2019
Los Peces de Cooper, with Alí Víquez. EUNED, 2015 [fiction, Spanish]