Sylvie Vauclair is an astrophysicist at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, and emeritus professor at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. She is a member of the French Académie nationale de l’air et de l’espace. She is the author of La Naissance des éléments published in 2006 and co-authored La Nouvelle Musique des sphères and De l’origine de l’univers à l’origine de la vie with Claude-Samuel Lévine
In just a short few centuries, the "silence of infinite spaces" that tormented Blaise Pascal has been populated by scholarly discourse and unexpected music. The divine cosmos has revealed itself to be much closer to us than we imagined: from infinite and eternal, it has come, like everyone else, to have a birth, the Big Bang, and an evolution of a few billion years. And if space has been populated by strange creatures like black holes or gravitational waves, thousands of exoplanets very similar to our Earth suggest the possibility of life elsewhere in our universe.
Vauclair tells here, keen to share her wonder and with the great scientific precision of an astrophysicist, a saga of extraordinary magnitude: that of the common origin of light, matter, living things, and finally man, evolving together to blossom into an ever richer and more surprising symphony.