André Holley

In Praise of our Sense of Smell

Disparaged by the great philosophers and even by Darwin, who considered it useless, yet praised by Proust and Baudelaire for the richness of the emotions it inspires, the human sense of smell is generally considered secondary to the other senses. But is it really? André Holley makes a scientific argument for this powerful yet ambiguous sense. He also examines the tendency on the part of our society to “deodorise” — to refuse accept that smells are sometimes bad, on the other hand inventing entirely new smells with the help of chemistry. Researcher at the CNRS, André Holley is a professor of neuroscience at the university Claude-Bernard in Lyon.

Richard P. Feynman

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

David Ruelle

Strange Beauty Of Mathematics

Claude Lorius

The Ice of Antarctica Memory and Passions

Alain Berthoz

The Sense of Motion

Yves-Alain Fontaine

Eels and Man

In this book, the author, an expert in his field, describes the most fascinating stages in the eel’s biological cycle, its migrations and the modifications it undergoes during its life. Eels interest us not only because of their life and breeding cycles, but also because of the questions they raise concerning our ideas about evolution. Does the notion of adaptation suffice to explain everything the eel has become? Doesn’t a living creature maintain a certain amount of independence in relation to the world that surrounds it? Or is the relationship between a living creature and the environment which surrounds it more complex that we have generally realised ?

Philippe Cury, Daniel Pauly

Eat Your Jellyfish! Human Impact on Nature

An uncompromising picture of overexploitation, especially of marine resources. Examples of certain actions that have been successfully undertaken show (perhaps) that all has not yet been lost.

Claude de Calan, Pierre Etaix

The Clown and the Wise Man

"One of us is an acrobat and a filmmaker who tries to provoke laughter; the other one tries to contribute to the progress of mathematical physics. Yet, we could endlessly throw our ideas back and forth. The surprising closeness of our approaches, the strange fraternity between our two disciplines, which are as far away from each other in their goals as in their techniques, gave us great joy. It is our feeling of wonder that we’d like to share here," write Pierre Etaix and Claude de Calan. Sometimes known as the French Buster Keaton, Pierre Etaix is a master of burlesque and the inventor of unequalled visual gags. Claude de Calan is a scientist at the Centre of Theoretical Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique.