On Thursday, April 25, 2019, the Laboratory of Molecular Chemistry and Environment (LCME) is pleased to welcome Professor Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, who will give a lecture entitled: "The future of science—the future of an illusion?"
The conference will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Montagne lecture hall on the Bourget-du-Lac campus.
About the conference
Modern science has a few centuries behind it. It is not clear that it has even one ahead of it. Since the "Galilean revolution," technical activities and scientific knowledge have slowly converged, with the former initially inspiring the latter, before the latter belatedly fertilizing the former. The unprecedented effectiveness of this coupling has been such that science is now in danger of being overtaken by its own success and overshadowed by the very techniques it has spawned, giving rise to "technoscience." The paradox of this new form of organization of knowledge and know-how is that it leads to the obscuring of intellectual speculation by material action: the transformation of the world now takes precedence over its understanding, returning to the archaic configuration that preceded the scientific revolution. If civilizations are mortal, so too are their sciences.
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, physicist, epistemologist, and essayist. Professor emeritus at the University of Nice. Director of scientific collections at Seuil, and of the journal Alliage (culture, science, technology). Author of numerous research articles in theoretical physics and the philosophy of science, as well as several essays on the place and role of science in culture (and vice versa). He recently published La science (n’)e(s)t pas l’art (Hermann, 2010), Le grand écart : la science entre technique et culture (Manucius, 2012), La science expliquée à mes petits enfants ( Seuil, 2014), and L’atome expliqué à mes petits-enfants ( Seuil, 2016).
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Contact: Micheline Draye