Welcome

Jean-Pierre Changeux

Light During the Enlightenment and Today Publication date : September 15, 2005

La Lumière au siècle des Lumières covers science, art and philosophy, and examines how eighteenth-century scientific research and discoveries not only resulted in an increase in technical progress but also led to a shift in taste.
The simultaneous presentation of artworks and of scientific objects and documents and their assimilation into the history of ideas (from the discovery of Newton’s findings by the scientific and philosophic community to the works of the French National Convention of 1793) illustrate the impact that the development of knowledge and of scientific methodology had on intellectual evolution — an evolution that would lead to the creation of a democratic republican civil society.

The publication of La Lumière au siècle des Lumières will coincide with the opening of an exhibition of the same name, to be held at Galeries Poirel, in Nancy, France, from 16 September to 16 December. The book, which is in the form of a catalogue of the exhibition and contains over 200 full-colour reproductions, includes contributions by eminent authors in the fields of neuroscience, biology, history of science, astrophysics and art history. The exhibition is part of the International Year of Physics.

Jean-Pierre Changeux is a neurobiologist. He is a professor at the Collège de France and at the Institut Pasteur and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Contributors:

Michel Blay, Olivier Bloch, Pierre Buisseret, Blandine Chavanne, Michèle Cussenot, Erwin Dreyer, Anne Fagot-Largeault (professor at the Collège de France), Michel Imbert (ENS-EHESS), Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1977), Jean-Pierre Luminet, Alain Mercier, Geoffrey Quilley, Daniel Roche (professor at the Collège de France), Yves Rossetti, Stéphane Schmitt, Etienne Taillemite, Sacha Tomic, Patrick Tort, Zina Weygand.