Einstein at the Collège de France

Passage des disciplines: histoire globale du Collège de France, ^XIXe-XXe siècle

In 1914, Albert Einstein had been invited to give the Michonis Lectures, organized from 1905 onwards by the patron Georges Michonis to ensure that foreign scientists were regularly invited to speak at the Collège de France. The outbreak of war prevented Einstein from coming to Paris. At the instigation of Paul Langevin, Professor of General and Experimental Physics at the Collège de France (1909-1946), the invitation was renewed in February 1922, shortly after English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington's 1919 tests of the theory of general relativity, which contributed to Einstein's worldwide fame.

In the post-war context, it was imperative, according to Langevin, to re-establish relations between German and French scientists, despite the anti-German sentiment that led some scientists to oppose Einstein's theories and his presence in France. The Collège, which astronomer Charles Nordmann called "Einstein's headquarters" for the occasion because it was "the center of discussion" of the scientist's theories, was an exception in the landscape of French higher education ("Einstein à Paris", Revue des Deux Mondes, t. 8, 1922, p. 935). As well as expounding his new theories to a learned public at the Collège, Einstein also spoke at the Société française de philosophie, where important discussions took place with Collège professors, notably Jacques Hadamard, professor of Mécanique analytique et mécanique céleste (1909-1937), and Henri Bergson, professor of Philosophie grecque et moderne (1900-1904), then of Philosophie moderne (1904-1921). In 1933, again on Langevin's initiative, the Collège created a chair for Einstein, who had fled Germany. Having already accepted a position at Princeton's newly-created Institute for Advanced Study (1930), Einstein never took up the chair.

Using Einstein's visit to the Collège as a guideline, and the Collège's openness to his theories as a starting point, this symposium will examine the impact of Einstein's ideas on French physics and, more broadly, on the formation of knowledge and the arts (from the 1910s to the Second World War) in France and beyond. Unlike Freud and Darwin, whose reception at the Collège was difficult - the subject of two previous colloquia - Einstein's theory of relativity was introduced early on by Langevin, who made it the subject of his lectures as early as 1910-1911. Other physicists at the Collège (Léon Brillouin [Theoretical Physics, 1932-1949], Frédéric Joliot [Nuclear Chemistry, 1937-1958] and André Lichnérowicz [Mathematical Physics, 1952-1986], ), as well as professors of philosophy, poetics and history (Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry [Poétique, 1937-1945], Lucien Febvre, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty [Philosophie, 1952-1961]), to name but a few. The colloquium will bring together physicists, historians of science, sociologists, philosophers and literary critics, with the aim of taking a fresh look, from the Collège de France, at the upheaval in ideas caused by Einstein's physics, described by historian Lucien Febvre, Professor of the History of Modern Civilization (1933-1949), as "the great drama of relativity", and by Merleau-Ponty as "the crisis of reason".

With financial support from PSL (2017-2020), the colloquium is organized by Antoine Compagnon, Jean Dalibard and Jean-François Joanny, as part of the project, directed by Antoine Compagnon in collaboration with Céline Surprenant, "Passage des disciplines: Histoire globale du Collège de France, ^XIXe-XXe siècle", which focuses on the evolution of the subjects taught as well as those that were not admitted and which form a "virtual College", from the end of the ^18th century to the 1960s.