The physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier

May 4, 2004:**

The physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier died on Tuesday, May 4, at the age of 84. He was one of the outstanding figures of French physics (Director of Research at the Cnrs) and also a man committed to all the struggles of the French left. A much-loved student of Louis de Broglie, Jean-Pierre Vigier very quickly adopted his points of view and developed, with numerous collaborators and in a great many publications, the theory of "pilot waves". In this he opposed the point of view of the Copenhagen School (Bohr and Heisenberg) and, as a necessary complement to this point of view, he considered that the photon of light is a particle endowed with a rest mass, with an energy of its own, and not merely associated with its motion, as are all the other leptons such as neutrinos. From this he deduced a cosmological theory around the theory of the "fatigue of light", an at least partial alternative to the Big Bang model. Above all, Jean-Pierre Vigier took part in the great debate linked to the EPR paradox, which long agitated the world of physicists, where he cut the figure of a heretic; he had proposed crucial experiments, unfortunately of too great a difficulty. Jean-Pierre Vigier was also attached to his youth as an FTP in the French resistance. A communist, courageous and even heroic in combat, he had remained profoundly so in the aftermath of the war; he received numerous decorations, notably from the Vietnamese government, which regarded him as "a liberator of Vietnam"; he was proud of this past as a "campaigner for ideas". He remained committed, his voice often raised, enthusiasm as his banner, whether for the causes of sacrificed minorities, of those left behind by the regimes in power, here or there - or of the theories he defended without weakness. There will remain of Jean-Pierre Vigier an extremely vivid memory, that of one of those "forces of nature" who, on the margins of the most advanced science, draw numerous physicists into an attitude that is at once critical and constructive.

Jean-Claude Pecker, Honorary Professor at the Collège de France member of the Academy of Sciences