“I’m a researcher. I work at the university in the department of cosmology. I try to understand the universe and to find the best theory that can describe the structure of matter. So far it’s a theory called Lambda Cold Dark Matter. The main problem with this theory is that we don’t know what is the nature of dark matter. And the prediction that the cosmological constant must take isn’t the same that we observe in the universe. There’s a difference of an order of 10 to the power of 60. It’s a real problem.

Things such as the conservation of the environment also interest me a lot. Because I realized that I can write the equations of general relativity that can describe the universe, but I couldn’t tell you what specie that tree belongs to ! I thought this wasn’t a good thing. So I’m going to learn more about the natural world. If you look at the universe at a large scale, it’s very simple. You just need 5 or 6 parameters, such as the rate of expansion, and put these numbers in the equations of general relativity, and you can explain almost every observation that we have made until today. But the trees ! You can’t do the same thing with the trees !

It’s also maybe a philosophical question. At a very large scale things are very easy to describe, and at a very small scale it’s also very easy. But there are no equations that can describe how the tree grows, and all the things it needs to do to live. So there is a region of things that is neither very big, nor very small, and where things are very complicated. On the scale of complicated things, I feel like humans are bang in the middle of complication. Peek complication !”

(Parc des Bastions | translted from French)