Many engineers and researchers discovered their vocation by reading popular science books. To keep these vocations flourishing, it is important to have high school students read these works written by renowned scientists who can serve as role models. Wouldsayso took part in the launch of the Cosmos Prize in France, which invites high school classes to read and vote each year for the main works published for the general public interested in a scientific field exploring the Cosmos in the broad sense.
in summary
According to tradition, the dawn of Western philosophy and scientific thought began about 2,500 years ago in the Greek cities of the Aegean SeaAegean Sea and Magna Graecia in Sicily and southern Italy. One of the founding and determining figures was Pythagoras, probably born around 580 BC on Samos, an island in the southeastern Aegean Sea, died around 495 BC To describe the physical world, that of the Earth and the stars, he then uses the term cosmos which comes from ancient Greek κόσμος which mainly means ” order, good order, orderly arrangement “, but which can also be associated with the idea of an adornment with its beauty and especially its creation (we find the multiple meaning of the term with that of cosmetic).
The Pythagorean school would later have Archytas of Tarentum as its major representative (born around 435 BC in Tarentum in Magna Graecia and died in 347 BC off the coast of Apulia). He was, as we say today, a polymath mathematicianmathematician, astronomerastronomerengineer, politician, strategist and general who was a friend and probably also one of Plato’s main mentors.
On the left, Archytas of Tarentum. Bust from the Villa of the Papyri of Herculaneum, today in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. On the right, bust of Plato. Marble, Roman copy of a Greek original from the last quarter of the 4th century.e century BC in the Vatican Museum. © DP
According to Archytas, “ Philosophy may be said to be the desire to know and understand things themselves, united with practical virtue, inspired by the love of science and realized by it. The beginning of philosophy is the science of nature; the environment, practical life; the end, science itself “.
This conception is still valid and can be seen embodied, at least partially, later in the famous popular science work CosmosCosmos and the eponymous television series by Carl Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan with the wonderful music of Vangelis.
Carl SaganCarl Sagan and his wife presented the modern vision of the Cosmos as an ordered and evolving whole, covering a wide range of subjects from astronomy, physics and biology, with the theory of evolutiontheory of evolutionand the history of science, from the first Greek philosophers to EinsteinEinstein passing through Kepler and Newton and more generally the builders of the Sky according to the series of works by Jean-Pierre Luminet.
The book also gives pride of place to the exploration of the Solar System and the search for the origin of life and life elsewhere at the time when theexobiologyexobiology was taking off. It also discusses the future of humanity and the risk posed to it by the specter of nuclear weapons and the wars of the future.
Cosmos: A Personal Journey – Episode 1 The shores of a cosmic ocean. Originally aired in 1980, this thirteen-part television series, written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, captivated audiences around the world. With Carl Sagan as our guide, we revisit this iconic series that has inspired generations of scientists and dreamers. This version dates back to 2000, when it was remastered and re-released with updated graphics and music. The series was created under a Creative Commons license, using material freely available on the Internet Archive in the hopes that the timeless knowledge and ideas of Cosmos will be accessible to a new generation. Whether you are a long-time fan or discovering it for the first time, you will have a breathtaking experience. We believe that the world needs Carl’s wisdom now more than ever and that this type of message is desperately needed by humanity. © DP
A year ago, with reference to the work of Carl Sagan but also that of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th centurye century, CosmosTHE physicistphysicist theorist specializing in superstring theorysuperstring theory Pierre Vanhove (from the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT) located on the Saclay plateau) was at the origin, with a group of physicists, of the French edition of the Cosmos AwardThis is an international initiative undertaken by Professor Gianfranco Bertone in collaboration with Città Metropolitana of the Calabria region in Italy.
Like its Italian model, the main objective of the Cosmos Prize is the promotion of scientific culture and is divided into two prizes awarded each year to the best works of broadcastbroadcast scientific published in French in the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics and science in general.
An initial selection of works is made by a scientific committee composed of researchers and personalities from the field of scientific dissemination.
Part of the prize is finally awarded to one of the works reserved for the committee and a second, for the “Cosmos des lycéens”, is awarded by French-speaking students from high schools in France and abroad who will have to vote among the works proposed specifically for them by the scientific committee. This prize is open to any French high school, middle school in Switzerland or higher education students in Belgium wishing to participate in this initiative.
As the French website of the Cosmos Prize explains, this competition for popular science books, which has already enjoyed great success in Italy and the Netherlands, ” is characterized by the European context in which it is inserted as well as by the commitment of the project to involve high school students (targeting rather the first and final year classes) in the reading of popularization works by creating a space for dialogue between students and authors. Particular attention will be paid to the inclusion in the initiative of establishments which, typically for geographical constraints, have more difficult access to high-level popularization events. “.
For the year 2024, here are the results!
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Cosmos High School Students’ Prize
Helen Courtois, Travel on the waves of galaxies, published by Dunod.
Hélène Courtois, a passionate astrophysicist, shares her quest to map the cosmos. She visited the world’s largest telescopes to measure the glow of thousands of galaxies and deduce the distances between them and their gravitational effects. This data was then processed and analyzed, to finally obtain a volume image of the supercluster to which our Milky Way belongs, an extragalactic continent 500 million light years across called “Laniakea”. Hélène Courtois is an internationally renowned French astrophysicist. Professor and Vice-President of the University of Lyon 1, she is a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France. Very committed to the dissemination of emerging knowledge to the general public, she is the scientific patron of the Vaulx-en-Velin planetarium. © Dunod
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Cosmos Committee Prize
Jordan Ellenberg (translated from English by Françoise Bouillot), Shapes – The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy and Everything Else, published by Cassini.
The answers to everything from how computers learn to play chess to how a democracy should choose its representatives can be found in geometry. Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg reveals the geometry hidden beneath some of the most important problems we face. Jordan Ellenberg is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and the Sunday Times bestselling author of How not to make a mistakeas well as an award-winning novel, The Grasshopper King. He has lectured worldwide on his research in number theory and writes regularly for the New York TimesTHE Washington Post And Wired. This conference was broadcast live on 1er July 2021. To get a fairly accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. The English subtitles should then appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Choose “French”. © The Royal Institution
Ceremony
The Cosmos Awards ceremony took place at the Institut de France, 23 quai de Conti, 75006 Paris, salle Hugot, on June 10, 2024.
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