Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist and science popularizer, dies aged 91

Together with his patriarchal silhouette – balding head, white beard, glowing blue eyes – his singing Quebec accent and his exact, colourful phrases, Hubert Reeves was each the grandfather who may inform us fantastic tales and the wizard who combined the components of the Universe in his cauldron. A pint of Milky Manner, an extract of Moon, a couple of mysterious grains of darkish matter… He defined to us that we had been all fabricated from stardust, as a lot of the parts that make us up, similar to carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, come immediately from stellar forges. On the finish of his time on Earth, on October 13, the astrophysicist returned to this cosmic mud. He was 91 years outdated.

It was straightforward to overlook he had ever been a toddler. But Reeves, born in Montréal on July 13, 1932, would usually journey again in time to his youth. He would evoke the big wood household residence overlooking Lake Saint-Louis, which his grandfather had constructed in the beginning of the 20^th century and the place he had so many reminiscences: canoe journeys, his mom’s name at dusk (“Have you ever seen the sky?”) and, final however not least, his maternal grandmother, Charlotte Tourangeau, to whom Hubert owed his storytelling abilities, and who have to be talked about right here. Charlotte Tourangeau had no equal when it got here to embellishing Charles Perrault’s tales, extending and even mixing them to go well with her creativeness.

Theoretical physics

“What you worth by saying ‘that is fascinating’, your youngsters discover worthwhile,” he as soon as advised Le Monde throughout a gathering in 2002. “My mother and father liked something to do with the pure sciences, so the concept I’d work in science got here to me very early on.” Keen on arithmetic, the younger Reeves opted for theoretical physics, which he studied first in Montreal after which in america at Cornell College in New York State, the place, he recalled, “the founders of nuclear astrophysics had been to be discovered. There was the magic of the good American universities, the place you’re feeling able to doing nice issues. There was an infectious creativity that gave you wings.” At Cornell, he accomplished his thesis underneath the supervision of Edwin Salpeter (1924-2008), who grew to become well-known for exhibiting how stars, by fusing three helium atoms, give rise to a carbon atom.

Reeves dived into the Universe’s previous, understanding that to be an astrophysicist was to turn out to be the historian of the cosmos and of matter. He was significantly desirous about three gentle parts – lithium, beryllium and boron – too massive to have been made on the time of the large bang, however too fragile to have been conceived within the thermonuclear hearth of the celebrities. With Jean Audouze, the Canadian researcher confirmed that these parts are created when high-energy cosmic rays break up carbon, oxygen or nitrogen nuclei in house. In 2018, astrophysicist Michel Cassé, one in all Hubert Reeves’ PhD college students, stated: “It is a paper that marked the occasions. Hubert had a really penetrating mind-set about issues within the sky. He wasn’t subtle, he wasn’t a dandy: he actually went straight to the purpose with out getting slowed down in frills.”

Within the early Sixties, Reeves taught in Montreal and have become a scientific advisor to NASA. There, he educated professors for the house science departments that had been bobbing up in every single place in US universities because the conquest of house took off. However, uncomfortable with the nationalist ambiance in Quebec and desirous to discover different horizons, he had his coronary heart set on Europe. In 1964, he took a sabbatical and taught nuclear physics on the Université libre de Bruxelles. He was then invited to share his data in France. It was a turning level in his life. He by no means regarded again.

Popularizing science

Director of analysis on the CNRS, France’s nationwide scientific analysis heart, and scientific advisor to the French Atomic Vitality Fee, Reeves has adopted a well-established profession path. His second life, that of a media darling and storyteller of the celebrities, fell into his lap considerably by likelihood. Inspired by associates, he wrote a primary manuscript entitled Persistence dans l’azur (“Persistence within the Blue”), in reference to a poem by Paul Valéry. He offered it to some thirty publishers, all of whom refused to publish it, foolishly believing that astronomy was of no curiosity to anybody, regardless of the common questions concerning the origins of the world to which it supplies solutions.

Reeves was about to place his manuscript away in a drawer and stay the virtually nameless researcher that he was, till the physicist Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, who heads the “Science ouverte” assortment at Editions du Seuil, means that he…write a ebook. It was already prepared: Persistence dans l’azur was revealed in 1981, and the French found Reeves who recounted the cosmos like one reads a novel.

“I used to be advised I would be fortunate if it bought three thousand copies. At present, we have bought over 1,000,000 copies and it has been translated into over thirty languages,” Reeves advised Le Monde in 2002. Within the early Eighties, fame swooped down on him like a chicken of prey on a subject mouse, however he knew he needed to be cautious of it and preserve it at arm’s size: “Fame is destabilizing, intoxicating and just a little harmful: you run the chance of getting a giant head. Thankfully, my spouse and associates regulate me.” The book-television-lecture cycle started. Some thirty books adopted Persistence dans l’azur, together with Dernières nouvelles du cosmos (“Newest information from the Cosmos”, 1994), and his memoirs Je n’aurai pas le temps (“I Will not Have Time”, 2008).

Defending the surroundings

A request for a lecture would arrive within the mail on a regular basis and he imposed strict self-discipline on himself after an excessive amount of involvement in his work value him a divorce adopted by melancholy. He gave one lecture per week in France and one a month overseas. In all, he gave greater than 2,500 lectures.

Reeves additionally took on the function of environmentalist. In 2001, he succeeded Théodore Monod as the pinnacle of the Ligue ROC for the preservation of wildlife. Just a few years later, the group was renamed Humanité et biodiversité (Humanity and Biodiversity), and he grew to become its honorary chairman. His love of nature, inherited from his mother and father, by no means left him.

Together with his second spouse, the journalist Camille Scoffier, he purchased “a dilapidated outdated farmhouse,” in northern France, as he recounted in his memoirs. There are century-old oaks there, however Reeves needed to go additional by creating what he known as “the millennium forest, bushes that may reside for over a thousand years: cedars of Lebanon, redwoods, lime bushes, ginkgos.”

Distressed by international warming, air pollution and the lack of biodiversity that he himself noticed within the backyard of his nation residence, he places his fame on the service of the local weather wrestle. He wrote articles and known as on mayors, members of parliament and candidates within the 2012 presidential election. “In Malicorne, I had lengthy seen him take a deep curiosity in vegetation and birds, which meant rather a lot to him,” Michel Cassé advised Le Monde in 2018. He summed up his buddy’s profession as follows: “After skimming the skies, he grew to become passionate concerning the Earth.”

In Je n’aurai pas le temps, Reeves asserted that astronomy and ecology might be seen “as two aspects of the identical theme: our existence. Astronomy, by telling us the story of the Universe, tells us the place we got here from, and the way we got here to be right here at the moment. Ecology, by making us conscious of the threats to our future, goals to inform us keep there.”

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