Screenwriter, playwright and writer Jean-Claude Carrière is the author of best-sellers like Einstein, s’il vous plaît (Please, Mr. Einstein – English language version), Fragilité, Tous en scène, and, more recently, Croyance.
Michel Cassé is an astrophysicist, Director of Research at the Atomic Energy Commission and Associate Research Scientist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. His publications include Du vide et de la Création and Energie noire, matière noire.
Jean Audouze is also an astrophysicist and the author of numerous books making science accessible to the layman. He is Director of Research Emeritus at CNRS (the National Centre for Scientific Research). A student of Hubert Reeves, he was the Director of the science museum, le Palais de la Découverte (Discovery Palace) from 1998 to 2004, and one of the founders of ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency) and a scientific advisor to the Office of the President of the Republic, François Mitterand, from 1989 to 1993.
Thirty years ago, two astrophysicists and a screenwriter published an initial book, Conversations about the Invisible. The question was a simple one: is it possible to tell everything, in scientific terms, to one attentive but ignorant ear?
They answered in the affirmative and they proved it.
Thirty years later, they decided to pick up where they had left off. For two years, they met once a week to talk about all the new developments observed around the world: the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, dark energy, exo-planets, multiple universes, transhumanism, nanotechnology, the future lives of robots, and on and on…
Here is the result, entitled Du Nouveau dans l’invisible (New Developments in the Invisible world). Here we learn, if we didn’t already know it, that the universe is expanding more rapidly than we thought, that more than twenty billion planets are said to be “habitable” in our galaxy alone, that robots are already inventing languages that we don’t understand, that in America, a marriage has even been considered between a human being and a robot, that the invisible is making progress, that it is pervasive and all-consuming, that we can divide a single strand of hair into a hundred thousand threads, and that science, after so many centuries of efforts and discoveries, has finally arrived on the shores of uncertainty.
In the end, the three friends fought constantly over the most profound mystery of all, the nature of the human mind and its relationship with the world.