If a journalist traveled back in time from 2023 to Barcelona in 1881, he would find himself in a strange world where little of what he knows would be of any use. He would have to be discreet about where he came from, since no one would yet know the temporal paradoxes of the theory of relativity and he could end up imprisoned in an asylum, according to the custom of the time. Let's suppose for a moment that I convinced the Godós, or the first director of La Vanguardia, to interview the scientists whose research was going to change the world.
I could start with Louis Pasteur, whom I would contact by letter and go to visit by rail, since there were still no telephones or planes. The French chemist and microbiologist would explain his theory that germs cause disease, his project to develop a vaccine against rabies, and his daring proposal that surgeons wash their hands and disinfect instruments before operating.
But if the journalist asked him how to cure diseases caused by germs, Pasteur could not give him an answer. There was still almost half a century to discover the first antibiotic against infections caused by bacteria. And viruses had not even been discovered.
The series of interviews could continue with the young German physicist Heinrich Hertz, the man of Hertzian waves, who a few years later would demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves. Much of the technologies that our journalist used before traveling to the past are based on the waves discovered by Hertz. Without electromagnetic waves, there would be no radio, no satellites, no mobile phones, no internet.
But Hertz couldn't imagine any of these advances. When asked about his job applications, he humbly replied: "nothing, I guess." He died young, at 36 years old, without knowing that electromagnetic radiation is mediated by particles, later called photons, on which the quantum technologies that raise so many expectations in 2023 are based.
Better headlines would be given by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who in 1877 said he had discovered channels on the surface of Mars. Schiaparelli never said that the canali, as he called them, were the work of Martians. But his words were mistakenly translated into English as canals (of artificial origin) instead of channels (of natural origin), which popularized the idea that Mars was inhabited. Schiaparelli himself argued that there could be organic life on Mars.
He would have loved to know that a century later ships would be sent to Mars, and beyond, and that there would be a new profession of space travelers, and that they could be both men and women. It would seem more unlikely that the Milky Way does not contain the entire Universe, but is one galaxy among billions; and that the Universe is not static and eternal, but was born in a big bang, is expanding and it is not known how it will end.
Returning to Barcelona, the special envoy to the past could interview a few years later Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who lived five years in the Raval neighborhood, at the time when he discovered that the nervous system is made up of a peculiar type of cells. connected between them called neurons, and who in 1906 would become the first – and so far only – scientist to have received a Nobel Prize for research carried out in Spain.
La Vanguardia already informed its readers at that time about medical and scientific advances in articles signed by illustrious collaborators. Doctor Bartomeu Robert, the most prominent doctor in Barcelona society in the last decades of the 19th century, who would become mayor of the city in 1899, wrote about medicine. Josep Comas i Solà, a pioneer of scientific dissemination in Spain and eminent astronomer who discovered that Saturn's moon Titan has an atmosphere.
Perhaps what surprised the journalist most was the extreme ignorance of those great scientists of the past about DNA, electrons, hominids and other elementary concepts that are learned in school today. It would inevitably deduce that we will appear equally ignorant to the humans of the year 2165, when another 142 years have passed.
With one difference: the scientists of Pasteur's time thought they were helping to improve the world; Those of today have discovered enough to know that future generations will pay for the excesses of today's humanity. Those who read The Vanguard in 2165, if it still exists (why not?), will see us not only as ignorant. Also as arrogant and irresponsible: how is it possible that, knowing what they were doing, they left the world the way they left it?
