Why I will not be giving any MHD courses,
neither at Supaéro nor on my website.
J.P. Petit
page 0
December 12, 2003:
I had planned to post on my website a richly illustrated text summarizing everything I had covered during a conference that lasted nearly three hours. In the meantime, I've seen emerge all these "cold plasma" projects, some of which were even led by the CNRS itself. France suddenly discovers an irresistible interest in research topics for which I had struggled, in vain, for over twenty years—going so far, like Bernard Palissy, as to work in a basement with scavenged equipment.
All of this has left me suddenly with a bitter taste in my mouth. A past that for me began in 1965 has resurfaced in the form of thick, putrid fumes.
Some find my texts grating, my tone often bitter. Perhaps it's good that I now reveal my true thoughts: the world of research, young people, is generally rather unpleasant. Not only are there many dishonest individuals, but there are also many who are stupid—and often both at once.
There isn't a month that goes by without a young student writing to me saying, "It's done—I've found my path. I'm going to become a researcher." And I always try to dissuade them, knowing that perhaps things aren't much better elsewhere. Let me tell you a story from the late 1950s. I had just joined Supaéro, at a time when the school was still located on Boulevard Victor, in southern Paris. I had been invited to spend the weekend at a friend's house, whose husband was a wealthy nobleman, the Count de Pomereu. At his table were Jean-François Revel and Nathalie Sarraute, among others whose names I've forgotten. I was introduced to a certain Kreisl, who explained he was stationed at Princeton University, where he worked on mathematical logic.
"But you're not actually at Princeton right now..."
"No, I travel all over the place and I jump on young students."
"So you're hardly ever at Princeton?"
"Ja. Occasionally I produce a little theorem just to keep people from bothering me. But there is one day when you absolutely must be at the university: the day of the reunion, when the dean delivers his speech in front of all the teachers and researchers."
"Excuse me, but as a young engineering student, I don't know what 'research' is called."
"Ahr so! My dear, it's for whoever steals the first one!"
That phrase stuck in my ear, and I must admit I've experienced it many times since. In fact, in this world, the only way to avoid problems is to have no ideas at all—which, fortunately, is the case for the vast majority of researchers. The more ideas you have, the more trouble you get into. I must say, when I started working with MHD, I was served barely a year after joining a CNRS laboratory. In 1966, as some journals are now reminding us, I became the first person in the world to successfully operate an MHD generator "out of equilibrium," equipped with two distinctly different temperatures: four to six thousand degrees for the gas, ten thousand for the "electron gas." I had found a way to "capture the Vélikhov velocity instability," and it worked on the first try. Everything was settled in a single morning—I remember it well. I presented this at the 1967 MHD conference in Warsaw. And that's when the troubles began. Many people thought this was a breakthrough of the century, reasoning, "If he managed to reduce the gas temperature from 10,000 to 4,000 degrees, the rest of the journey must be possible. If the gas temperature can be lowered to 1,500 Kelvin, then there must exist materials capable of withstanding such temperatures. The industrial applications of this direct conversion process—thermal energy, then kinetic, into electrical energy with an efficiency potentially reaching 60%—represented enormous sums."
The state of siege lasted for years, until, after seven years at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics in Marseille, I finally told myself:
"Old chap, if you stay in this place, you'll go mad. You must find a way out."
So I became a theorist in six months. I devoured the entire kinetic theory of gases like a desperate man (Chapman and Cowling: "The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases," Cambridge University Press). If I'd had to learn Chinese to escape, I would have done it. In less than a year, I completed a perfectly respectable doctoral thesis and obtained a very favorable opinion on my work from Lichénrowicz, an academician and mathematician. With that, I managed to pull myself out of that abominable crab basket (the lab is now dissolved).
I removed the second member from my Boltzmann equation, as one trims a tree. It became the Vlasov equation. I coupled it with Poisson's equation, transformed my electrons into stars, and became an astrophysicist at the Marseille Observatory. There, it was as quiet as in a retirement home. To avoid trouble, I never requested funding, office space, or travel expenses—nothing. There's nothing quite like modest demands to enjoy peace and quiet while watching others fight over every penny. I often compared the university-research world to a chicken coop—often quite shabby. Once a year, the farmer comes and throws a handful of grain. The birds, taking off from their perches, then slaughter each other trying to grab as much as possible. These university "chickens" fight just as fiercely to secure perches from which they can then defecate on those below. I believe the most extraordinary thing about this milieu is that people expend the same energy as in the TV series "Dallas" over utterly ridiculous sums. Intrigues of palace politics so subtle they would make the Venetians admire them, elaborate and long-planned conspiracies, all for positions and powers that are perfectly insignificant.
Scientists are often boring, but science is fun—fortunately—when you decide to live it the way Lanturlu did. In 1975–76, I had a relapse into MHD, which led to an entirely new series of adventures I recounted in a book, "Enquête sur les OVNIS," published by Albin Michel. Again, not particularly brilliant stories—but they're common enough. I don't know if you've read "The Double Helix," written by Watson, who shared his Nobel Prize with Crick, his senior colleague. At the time, they were both at the Cavendish Laboratory, directed by "Bragg's son"—not the famous crystallographer Bragg, inventor of the law of the same name. Watson recounts that one day Crick had presented an idea in a seminar and was unpleasantly surprised to see it published a few weeks later by Bragg's son. He then stormed into the man's office to complain. Bragg, without looking up from the newspaper he was reading, replied:
"Mr. Crick, I remind you that you are merely a contractual employee here, and your position could be reconsidered at any moment. You may go."
Yes, indeed, that's very...