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CBPF COLLOQUIA Physics, metaphysics, mythophysics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Location: Ministro João Alberto Lins de Barros Auditorium, at CBPF, Rua Dr. Xavier Sigaud, 150, Urca, Rio de Janeiro (RJ). Date: July 4, 2017, Tuesday. Time: 4:00 p.m. (Free admission. Non-employees must present identification). ABSTRACT Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that science moved away from myth a few millennia ago, but that, since the last century, science and myth have been moving toward a convergence or reunion in unexpected ways. He also said that the place of the ancient supernatural is now occupied by contemporary physics, whose ontology of nature is so incomprehensible to laymen that physicists are forced to resort to parables (Schrödinger's cat, etc.) with a truly mythical value, to give a figurative idea of their theories and conjectures. Everything happens as if topics such as the expansion (or not) of the universe, the processes and objects of quantum mechanics, black holes, and dark energy were the modern equivalent of the ancient supernatural of ancient or traditional peoples. The lecture will consist of a commentary on these considerations by Lévi-Strauss. BRIEF CV Americanist ethnologist. PhD in social anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Full professor of social anthropology at UFRJ. Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (1997-98) and member of King's College, Cambridge (United Kingdom). Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in France. Medal of Francophonie from the Académie Française (1998); Erico Vanucci Mendes Prize from the CNPq (2004); National Order of Scientific Merit (2008); Doctor Honoris Causa from the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (2014). Admission to the colloquium is free and open to the public, with no need to register.