Abandon, de facto
April 27, 2002
See a reader's letter dated September 2002 at the end of the dossier with a testimony about the comments made about me by Hubert Reeves
I did well to give up
- Hello, Jean-Pierre, have you seen the latest Ciel et Espace, the May issue?
- No, why?
- There's a box on page 42 where you're quoted.
- Oh really. I think I'll find the newspaper in my mailbox shortly.
Indeed, here is the box in question:
For several months I had been in contact by email with Serge Jodra, the editor of the dossier, who was joined by Françoise Harroy-Mounin and Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud. The latter is an old acquaintance. It was to her that Science et Vie had turned in 76 to rewrite the article I had brought back from Livermore and Sandia. Philippe Cousin, the editor-in-chief, had not believed in the color photos I had brought back from the famous LLL, showing the two neodymium lasers of a terawatt of the Janus experiment that I had been the first "non-American" to approach. At the time, the French didn't even know the meaning of the word "terawatt". . Françoise Harroy-Mounin had therefore wisely collected, to relay the usual nonsense of the CEA. I have a portrait of Bonet-Bidaud in a corner of my website. He has a rather good face :
But for three years now, apparently, he is still lost in his inventory.
The Ciel & Espace dossier is titled "** Dark Matter: A Radio Scan of an Invisible World **". Boring to death. It's ... bla bla (maybe dark bla bla or obscure bla bla). There was a good budget for the illustrations, and it ends with the festival of "dark astroparticles", the axion and the neutralino (complete nonsense) taking the lead. It ends with pious wishes, expressions of hope, etc....
Ciel et Espace has become an ocean of blabla. As my friend Ledoux says, "it's the scientific version of Gala". But, in the end, everything has a character of homogeneity in the lack of imagination. I thought Jodra would be more courageous, but in the current French panorama, these few lines mentioning my name may represent the sign of great courage compared to the standards of Ciel et Espace and the French community oriented towards astrophysics and cosmology. I learn incidentally that my work represents "an expansion of the ideas of Foot and Volkas". Glad to learn that. When I think that my first paper presenting an "enantiomorphic universe" was a CRAS of 1977, it's mind-blowing: twenty five years. Foot and Volkas are trying to push a model where the second universe is P-symmetric. This, however, does not produce anything that can be confronted with observations (in contrast to my own work, read "We Lost Half the Universe", Albin Michel 1997, or dive into my published work, which is obviously more daring). They then tried a CP-symmetry. But that didn't work either. It explained nothing. Normal, the solution is a second CPT-symmetric universe. This is what I developed, published, and presented at the international Astro-Cosmo conference in June 2001. I sent everything to Jodra, with the necessary explanations, but there is no greater deafness than those who don't want to hear.
Let's be patient. Foot and Volkas, or others, will eventually find the trick. It will be difficult, because cosmologists and theoretical physicists are very uncomfortable with T-symmetry. They don't understand it well. As explained in detail, published, etc., T-symmetry is simply (Structure of Dynamical Systems, Souriau, 1974, Dunod edition) synonymous with inversion of energy and mass. There it is, this damned "dark energy" with which our guys have been masturbating for two years. Yes, the universe is accelerating, yes, it's due to a repulsion phenomenon. No, it's not the cosmological constant, it's our twin universe pushing ours from behind. Someone will soon find "the trick with negative masses". According to the latest news, some, learning that I was quitting, seem even to be taking over the matter. So Ciel et Espace, Science et Avenir, Pour la Science will hail this as "a great discovery".
I had a choice between an ulcer and abandonment. I chose abandonment, by instinct of self-preservation. In 87 I remember bringing two large garbage bags containing 22 years of MHD (wait for my next book on the subject. It will be... not bad in the style. I finished it a few weeks ago). It's time to make a new turn, to fill new garbage bags. One should not be surprised that CNRS found itself in the crosshairs of the court of accounts due to a low quality/price ratio. In the house, image is first and foremost taken care of. I remember a general director, Feneuille (former director of Lafarge cement, unless I'm mistaken) who had launched this strategy. We were flooded with color brochures representing him with his collaborators. It looked like a football team. But where was the ball?
It's time to be interested in something else. All of this has become so boring. Ciel et Espace will continue to track "non-events", that's its specialty. It must be said that not much is happening. I remember the conference on astroparticles in Montpellier in 99. A setup was made to create a Toulouse-Montpellier-Marseille axis. The result: the creation of a "laboratory focused on the detection of astroparticles", under the direction of CNRS and IN2P3. The neutralino was very popular. Let me explain: it comes from supersymmetry. Like the photino, the gluino, the gravitino, the schrtoumfino, etc. A discovery programmed for the centuries to come due to insufficient budgets. I'll tell you about the setup because it's worth its weight in candy. Let's call the "leader" of this neutralino detection project Tartempion. The neutralino, as its name suggests, is electrically neutral. The neutralinos are gregarious, like ordinary particles, which they are supposed to share the habitat with. You guessed it: if this WIMP exists, then we have the component of the dark matter halo that everyone is eagerly waiting for. In this deal, a lot of people had their hands in it. A certain Duchmoll, from my lab, the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory, calculated that there should be ten neutralinos per cubic centimeter in the Hercules cluster. Great, for a particle that depends on a hundred free parameters, which can apparently be reduced to twenty, by means of "certain simplifying assumptions". Duchmoll should explain his trick, how, in the absence of rabbits, he pulls the neutralinos out of his hat. At the end of the chain, Tartempion proposed to watch for these neutralinos by observing the Cerenkov effect produced when they arrive in the upper atmosphere. All this by using the installation of the Montlouis solar furnace. More far-fetched, you can't get. Still, it takes a lot of electron volts to reach the ground. Well, we attributed a sufficient virtue to the neutralinos. As Panglosse said: the electron volt is the sufficient reason for the neutralino. It must reach the ground, otherwise, without manipulation, no funding, no conferences at the conferences, no physics. For hypothetical particles, you can attribute all virtues, right? After the grocery calculations of Duchmoll came the grocery calculations of Tartempion, which were no better. It was necessary to foresee...