In 2005, the Generalitat de Catalunya awarded him the National Prize for Scientific Thought and Culture for his work imagining and creating the new Cosmocaixa.

As a scientist, Wagensberg made contributions to the production of scientific thought, in different fields, such as: thermodynamics of non-equilibrium, thermodynamics of microbiological crops, Monte Carlo method, theoretical biology, entomology, taphonomy, philosophy of science and scientific museology in specialized journals such as Journal of Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics, Physics A, American Journal of Physics, The Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Scandinavian Entomology, Beiträge zur Entomologie, Biology and Philosophy, Biological Theory, Computer Applications in Biosciences (CABIOS), Museum Practice or ECSITE News Letters.

[4] He was the author of journalistic essays, a score of books and a hundred research papers on thermodynamics, mathematics, biophysics, microbiology, paleontology, entomology, scientific museology and philosophy of science.

The collection, dedicated to scientific thought, has published more than a hundred titles by authors such as: Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Konrad Lorenz, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jacques Monod, François Jacob, Norbert Wiener, Murray Gell-Mann, Martin Gardner, Martin Rees, Richard Dawkins, Benoît Mandelbrot, Lynn Margulis, Douglas Hofstadter, Sheldon Glashow, René Thom and Wagensberg himself, among others.

He was the author of numerous aphorisms, published in newspapers (especially in El País) and in compilation books, such as Más árboles que ramas (Tusquets, 2012).