In this episode of La Loupe, Xavier Yvon analyzes the risks posed by the war in Ukraine to global scientific cooperation with Antoine Beau, journalist at L’Express and Alice Pannier, head of the geopolitics of technologies program at the French Institute of (IFRI).
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The team: Xavier Yvon (presentation), Mathias Penguilly (writing), Marion Galard (editing) and Jules Benveniste.
Music and dressing: Emmanuel Herschon / Studio Torrent
Picture credits: AFP
Logo: Anne-Laure Chapelain / Benjamin Chazal
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Xavier Yvon: At the beginning of this podcast, was a very different universe from the one we know today. A universe where the temperature reached several billion billion degrees and where matter weighed nothing, at least until the collision between fractions of atoms and a mysterious particle nicknamed “the Higgs boson”.
For nearly half a century, scientists around the world tried to demonstrate its existence, without success… Until 2012, when CERN, a state-of-the-art laboratory located on the Franco-Swiss border, finally succeeded. This is a major scientific advance: this Higgs boson is no longer present in the natural state today – we still know little about it – but it is suspected to be at the origin of the mass of everything around us. Since then, researchers from all over the world have been scrambling to study this particle and the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to scientists who, as early as the 1960s, had described its role in the formation of our world.
If you have read the description of this episode correctly, you know that it will be about the war in Ukraine, and you may not see the connection with this incredible scientific discovery.
However, for a year, CERN has been in crisis. This European Mecca of nuclear physics took drastic decisions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even if it meant endangering its raison d’être: to do science in the service of peace.
For further
PODCAST. War in Ukraine: the spring counter-offensive is preparing
Ukraine: “It is not by attacking science that we will bend the Russian government”
Putin and Russian Scientists: Revenge, Fake Degrees and Immortality
In France, research to the rescue of Ukrainian scientists