He approaches two terms that, in general, are not associated, to see if there would be sparks and other short circuits. The text clashes physics and philosophy, thought and action, analytical intelligence and physical courage... Interview with a thinker who has never ceased to cross the boundaries between disciplines.
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Mrs. Figaro. – Is Short-circuits a plea for interdisciplinarity?
Étienne Klein. – Yes and no. In high school, I had a physics teacher and a philosophy professor who both used the word "time" in their classes. I wondered if they were talking about the same thing. If not, why was it the same word, and if so, were they saying the same thing? Obviously not. I thought it lacked coherence, that they should have met to talk together about time and see what it would bring. It is this absence of dialogue that I experienced in the teaching that I tried to repair with this book.
Where did the chapter "Weaker Sex and Hard Sciences" come from?
From my reading of The Republic, where Plato holds a speech of absolute parity, while this is not the case in his Dialogues, where women are "ventriloquized" by men. So I painted portraits of women scientists who have been, such as the mathematician Sophie Germain or the chemist Ida Noddack, whose work has not been taken seriously, as it is as incredible as it is unfair that the brilliant physicist Lise Meitner, who wrote with her nephew the real article on nuclear fission, did not see her work recognized. While Otto Hahn, who only noticed it, had the Nobel Prize in Chemistry...
Short-circuits, by Étienne Klein, Éditions Gallimard, 224 p., €19. sp
It's also the first time you've used so much first-person...
This text has, indeed, a more personal coloration. No doubt it is related to the death of my brother, who was my antiparticle, gifted for everything manual, and very resistant to abstraction. There is this preconceived idea that intelligence is measured by the intellect, while the intelligence associated with the hand is considered weak. His death a year ago made me think about the difference between us and the difference in treatment by the school system, between me, who was good at arithmetic but unable to repair an engine, and him, who could repair any engine but who fell into sync in front of an equation. But ChatGPT will change that.
The private collection of Étienne Klein
La Force majeure, by Clément Rosset: "To understand that joy is based on the knowledge of the worst. To be joyful is to be joyful despite everything." In search of reality, by Bernard d'Espagnat: "This book, read at the age of 20, determined my destiny. I understood that sometimes physics changes the philosophical situation." Life and Destiny, by Vasily Grossman: "He explains that it is in the name of good that one allows oneself to do evil. The good must remain a vague concept." The Part and the Whole, by Werner Heisenberg: "He tells his own trajectory to demonstrate that quantum particles have no trajectory."
In what way?
AI was expected to compete with manual trades, but in fact it is white-collar workers who are threatened. This is Moravec's paradox, according to which the easier a task is for a human, the more difficult it is for a robot. No robot can do what my brother was doing, while doing calculations, writing articles, or writing a book like I do, is within their reach.