Letter to Professor Henri Broch
Director of the Zetetic Laboratory
of the faculty of
Nice Sophia Antipolis
May 31, 2009
Mr. Professor,
As I have not received a response to my email of May 7, 2009, I am reformulating my proposal via my website, hoping that this message will reach you this time, and that you will be able to respond, in one way or another:
Copy of my email of May 7, 2009 (where Professor Georges Charpak was in copy):
Jean-Pierre Petit, PhD in physics, to Professor Henri Broch, Director of the Center of Zetetics at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis.
May 7, 2009
Dear Colleague,
I hope my clumsiness in my first email did not offend you. I see that you have become very quiet. I hope I have not caused anything unpleasant. If that is the case, just tell me, very simply. Let us not let a regrettable misunderstanding take root.
I told you I was sorry for having confused the Zetetics of Nice Sophia Antipolis, a prestigious cradle of this discipline, with a so-called Zetetics of a so-called "Observatory of Zetetics," and you told me you had nothing to do with these Zetetics.
I did not understand, when you wrote me "while you are there, address yourself to the zetetic theater," that this theater actually existed. I thought it was a joke. So be it, and additional apologies.
One must admit that for someone who has just arrived, while Zetetics has not yet acquired, as it surely will in the near future, its letters of nobility, its doctoral council, its university qualifications, a link with the CNRS, the Ministry of Research and Education, its publications, with their indispensable review boards, its doctoral theses, and the creation of Zetetics professorships in the academic world, it is not obvious to find one's way around.
To avoid such mistakes, the solution would be for you to give me, once and for all, a list of places or groups that offer proper Zetetics, which would allow me to stay away from the others, those who practice bad Zetetics. There, I rely on you, who I believe is the father-founder and reference of this new and exciting discipline.
I do not know if I am the author of this sentence, which I had put in one of my books twenty years ago:
- "Science, like any form of thought, is an organized system of beliefs."
Would I have deserved the title of Zetetic by writing that?
I have thought about many things. Zetetics, which you call the art of doubt, seems to me an excellent approach. Provided one can doubt the doubt, obviously. But that goes without saying.
Although retired from the CNRS, former research director, I would like to join your Zetetics Center as an associated researcher. I saw that you have a whole range of courses, but there is nothing about UFOs.
Therefore, I propose, within the framework of these Zetetics actions and courses, to offer the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis a course titled "Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon," whose content could obviously be included on the Center's website, of course with your approval.
All of this in a healthy and critical approach.
If you want, I could send you a description of the content of this course, which I could give there, of course for free. I would cover the transportation and accommodation costs in Nice.
I would also be delighted, in the same context, to be put in contact with other academic institutions listed on your website, such as the Center for Introduction to Higher Education in Grenoble, the CIES, where Zetetics courses are also offered, and where I could also intervene, if these people were interested in the content proposed, to expand their teaching offerings.
Always on a gratuitous basis, of course.
I am looking forward to your agreement on these two points: the integration into your Research Center and the possibility of having courses I would give integrated into a Zetetics curriculum.
I suppose, as the approaches are similar, that you must be in contact with the epistemologists of the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Letters in Nice. I myself gave courses for several years (I was in charge of "Exact Sciences" course) in the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Letters in Aix-en-Provence, and I have kept a very good memory of these contacts with "people from the humanities," who taught me a lot.
I fully agree with you when you say that the boundary between the humanities and the so-called exact sciences has no reason to exist.
By being in contact with people like Professor Gilles Gaston Granger, an eminent epistemologist, and his collaborator Philippe Mihn, I believe I can say, after my meeting with Professor Souriau, a mathematician who also taught in the Faculty of Letters (DEUG MASS: Applied Mathematics to the Social Sciences), that I had the opportunity to meet the brightest minds and the most extensive knowledge I have ever encountered among academics.
I imagine that the symbiosis between your Zetetics Center and the epistemology section of the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Nice has existed for a long time, forming a very enriching link.
I return to the UFO subject, for which there is currently no serious teaching in terms of methodology in the academic world, a gap I would like to fill with your help.
To date, no quality conference on the subject has ever been held, that is, one where the speakers' communications were carefully prepared (and in my opinion indispensable, to avoid multiple and varied deviations), published in advance in high-level scientific journals with a review board.
Indeed, the word "Ufology" has no meaning. There is no Ufology Center or Ufology Laboratory worthy of the name. There is also no Ufology journal. Ufology, as a self-referential discipline, simply does not exist.
If not, I would like to hold a congress whose theme would be "Can the UFO file be approached according to a scientific methodology? And if so, how?"
During our telephone conversation, you objected that you had no time to devote to such a project. Neither time nor means, which I can perfectly understand, given your multiple activities.
This is what I propose to you. One of the places where such a conference could take place is the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, just because the Nice Observatory includes many high-level scientists who could be invited to participate in this event.
But the university would never consider such a project without the endorsement of people like you, or Professor Charpak, with whom, I see, you have published books. I have included him in this message.
The starting point of this project, which we would manage entirely on a material level (assuming, if necessary, the costs of room rental, equipment, all the logistics and secretariat, the costs of...)