Dialogues with Science

António Piedade; Illustration: Maria Pimentel

António Piedade begins with a dialogue about a birthday between a twelve-year-old girl and her grandfather, in which a number game serves to show the timelessness of mathematical propositions. In the following text, a mother who, asked by her daughter about the appearance of the little fish in a lake, explains to her the similarity between her personal story and that of the fish she is seeing: “At dawn on your fourth day you arrived inside my uterus, and, in the score of your development, you were already in the blastocyst state. That is, you were a set of more than 64 cells.”

In the following text, we witness the conversation between Joana and her older brother about the succession of the seasons on Earth… or on Mars (Is There Spring on Mars?). Then, it’s another girl who decides, on World Music Day, to go listen to the sounds of Nature. In the following text, Colors of Autumn, there is no dialogue, but the reader can delight in a poetic-scientific description of the fall of the leaves. You can feel the presence of Gedeão, the author of Lágrima de Preta in O que tem a tua lágrima?, a dialogue between Rui and his uncle. Then, Patrícia wonders about the chemical elements inside her: she has 33 kilograms of water molecules, combinations of hydrogen and oxygen. The invocation of Gideão returns in O tio Antão, a conversation between uncle and nephew, in which the former conveys the idea of movement, for example of a marble.

In A clock that flows inside you!, Henrique observes a drop of blood under the microscope, motivated by an article in Nature. The following two texts refer to the 2010 and 2011 Nobel Prizes, presented in the form of railway metaphors. In the sequence, Helena appears with a flower in her hand, a bem-me-quer, who is surprised by a friend. In the following text appears the only fantasy character, Etolas, the architect of minerals.

In the sequel, there is a return to mathematics, with the Dialogue of zeros, literally a conversation between zeros, and Twelve Years, where Ana counts on her fingers. Finally, grandfather Jaime and his two twin grandchildren celebrate the 60th birthday of both their grandfather and the structure of DNA, since Jaime was born in the year, 1953, in which Watson and Crick identified the famous double helix.

NLP recommendation: 12-14 years old, 15-18 years old and over 18 years old