Objectives of Programme's Learning Outcomes

• Develop and integrate a high degree of autonomy.
• Pursue their education and gain additional knowledge and new skills.
• Adapt and evolve in a new context.
• Apply high quality scientific methodology.
• Critically reflect on the impact of chemistry in general and projects to which they particularly contribute.
• Demonstrate thoroughness, independence, creativity, intellectual honesty, and ethical values.

Learning Outcomes of UE

By the end of the course, students will have had an overview of the developments, struggles and conflicts of ideas that have made contemporary science what it is. Analogies between some of the challenges faced today and those faced in the past will be highlighted, in particular the circumstances that led to the separation between fact and opinion, between science and metaphysics (particularly religion), and between reason and faith, not forgetting the private sector's stranglehold on the fruits of the scientific process (through the capitalist-industrial complex). The example of technologies such as artificial intelligence, exploited by major companies, show the urgent need for a fundamental reflection on the status of science and its uses, and the need to provide it with a civilisational foundation;

UE Content: description and pedagogical relevance

This course is based on two observations: first, there is today a general questioning of science (from alternative facts to the denial of reality), which goes hand in hand with a crisis of the scientific research model itself (the crisis of reproducibility); second, scientists are generally unaware of the historical circumstances that prevailed in the invention and the often difficult acceptance of scientific concepts as we use them daily. This should not surprise us, because the engine that drives scientific knowledge is controversy, which can be resolved for a time until new discoveries challenge the established model.

The course follows 2 threads:
1°) ideas circulate with the peoples who convey them, thus fertilizing new areas of human thought over the centuries and millennia in lineages that sometimes reach the present time
2°) the texts that underlie them are also, for some of them, perfectly accessible literary works, and of great beauty.

The course covers the long term, going back to the written civilization of ancient Mesopotamia, and ending with the latest developments in transhumanism in Europe and the United States. It attempts to put into perspective the great developments in (pre-)scientific thought in relation to the political and religious, and even social and economic, context of each era.

It is impossible to address a complete vision of this theme in a 15-hour course, and unfortunately choices had to be made. We will not deal with science in the Chinese, Indian or Arab cultural spheres. We will limit ourselves to what we call today physics and chemistry, excluding the other scientific fields, in particular mathematics and biology.

The course is intended to be rather interactive: explanation of the context alternating with readings, by the students, of selected pieces, followed by a discussion on the understanding and the lessons to be drawn from it.

Table of contents:

Chapter 1: The Setting, Antiquity
Chapter 2 : The world is a sphere
Chapter 3 : The occult philosophy of the Renaissance
Chapter 4 : The emergence of the first modern science
Chapter 5: Science, Networks and Empires
Chapter 6: Heat, Electricity and Industry
Chapter 7: The Second Revolution of Modern Science
Chapter 8: The Ideology Behind Emerging Technologies (Enhancing human performances)

Prior Experience

Not applicable