Greetings everyone ! My name is François Rincon, I am a theoretical physicist working in France at CNRS. I have spent the first 20 years of my career doing research on nonlinear astrophysical fluid, plasma and magnetic-field dynamics in astrophysical systems spanning many scales, ranging from the Sun, to protoplanetary accretion disks, to clusters of galaxies and the primordial Universe.
(Astro)Physics has been a core part of my personal identity since my childhood and illuminates my views of the natural world. In particular, doing research on dynamical complexity on astronomical scales has contributed to my shaping an alarmed scientist perspective on a variety of very earthly issues, chief among which our climate & ecological crises.
However, quite paradoxically (or perhaps as a logical conclusion ? ), what I have learned in part thanks to my astrophysicist viewpoint has also increasingly led me in recent years to wonder if I should not use my scientific skills and training to help mitigate these crises instead of doing astrophysics. After much weighing of what was the best move from my comfy position in the astrophysics ivory tower, “looking up” from my speculative theoretical calculations, I have recently decided to gradually shift my research priorities to ecological sciences with a focus on biodiversity conservation, in an attempt to make the most of my research training, experience and vocation to modestly help, to the best of my scientific abilities, understand and mitigate the ecological crisis we are facing here, down on Earth.
Why? Well, first of all, with increasing professional experience, my personal views of astrophysics & astronomy have evolved to become quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is a field full of very smart people, intellectually challenging and exciting. But it is also now sufficiently mature that we essentially know all we need to know to grasp our insignificant, precarious, and yet fascinating position on Earth and in the larger Universe. In some sense, mission accomplished: the field has done its job (well) to scientifically enlighten human bipedes. On the other hand, there remains a myriad of unanswered difficult astrophysics questions, of overall lesser importance I think, and more or less interesting to solve, that in my opinion me and most of my colleagues could spend their lives working on without making much difference to the general progress, knowledge, and well-being of humanity in relation to our environment. Many of the research questions we work on have become in my opinion misguided intellectual raisons-d’être in an era of bloated, overhyped academic research and industrial-scale incremental scientific publication. Working on such difficult questions makes us feel busy and smart, but in reality my own impression, informed by accumulated experience, is that we are nowhere near close to have the adequate tools, theoretical, numerical, observational, or experimental, to make any significant progress on most of these. It is not even clear to me that the timescale of human societies is sufficiently large to be in a position to address some of these issues. Why then waste our energy and time on such questions, most of them quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things – when the exceptional times we live in invite us every day to focus our intellect on more pressing issues? Fact is, astrophysics is and will remain a very speculative field, with very limited falsifiability, for the foreseeable future. I may expand on this in future posts. What matters here is that having spent most of my own professional efforts ending up being not even wrong, all of this while the world burns, has become a personal major professional existential issue.
Then, there is the problem of the pollution footprint of astrophysics. Let’s write this plainly: we are the most polluting scientific field on the planet: mega-observatories, steel and concrete cathedrals of science built in remote desertic locations, mega-space observatories packed with electronics dumped into space by huge rockets (some of them built by corporations that are actively contributing to the destruction of our environment), billions of CPU hours spent in high-performance computing numerical models of rather limited informational value sucking lots of not-so-low-carbon electricity (3t/MCPUh in the lowest-emitting countries), lots of electronic purchases to develop high-tech astronomical instruments, and buzzing international travel all over the world to conferences and international collaborations all contribute to our huge footprint. In my current research institute, each individual, researcher or other, emits on average 28t CO2 eq/ year in his/her professional activities! My own individual professional footprint, including HPC (but excluding my occasional use of observational data from space observatories) was of the order of 10t CO2 eq/year until recently. None of this is sustainable and justifiable in my view for a field that is nowhere near essential to understand, document and help mitigate, least solve, the multiple environmental crises that humans have themselves generated. However, despite a rising awareness among the base, our community has barely started taking significant steps to change, at the science policy power levels that really matter. This would require questioning the actual need for our most polluting, core research activities, and to start downscaling significantly instrumentally and in term of human resources in the near future, especially on the engineering side. I am having a very hard time being part of the problem, as a scientist, in the environmental catastrophe movie unfolding in front of our eyes. Here too, I will probably talk more in future posts about the detailed arguments underlying the case I’m making, as I do not want to give the impression that I am writing this lightly.
Mix all these considerations together, and shake with a pinch of mid-career scientist professional existential angst and boredom, the feeling of having given it all on diverse problems and not being able to give more to the field, and you have the recipe for a major introspection and reconsideration of future career priorities. Being honest with myself, I have become quite tired of astrophysical sciences, of its research practices, and of my own perceived personal inadequacy to do anything truly significant there. I feel simultaneously useless and wasted. So I have concluded it is high time to use my energy, time and experience to modestly serve more important research causes before I get too old and intellectually rotten, using whatever limited intellectual capacities I have left at my advanced age of almost 45 (in theory, I still have 20+ years of research ahead…). And what better cause to serve than ecology and biodiversity conservation research for someone with a deep sensibility to nature, mountains, and complex patterns in the natural world?
This move has long been in the making, and this place will be here to describe my experience, thoughts and struggles as a scientist in the process of such a personally and scientifically difficult, and certainly not obvious professional transition. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience as it unfolds, both for egoïstic reasons, to encourage myself and to conserve momentum when things get difficult (as they inevitably will do), and also to make other younger or older people with similar questionings, maybe eager to take similar steps, relate and share. And also maybe as a bit of a grassroots-level utopian scientist activivist leading by example too, to contribute to instill, through my real actions of professional change a bigger sense of emergency and questioning among some colleagues less sensitive to these issues.
How, when, at what pace, where all of this is going to happen, and what is going to be posted in this place, will be a story for upcoming posts. I hope you enjoy the ride! Please feel free to weigh in in the comments now and then, and to tell me/us about your own experience and thoughts on the matters I will post about, especially if you are a scientist yourself. I would also like this place to be a forum for debate and experience-sharing. What is important for me though is that this is always done constructively, in a civil and informed way, and in good faith. My view of these exchanges is that they should in the end lift us all up, and help us better understand our place and role as humans, sometimes scientists, as both parts and powerful actors (for the best or the worst) of our earthly natural world.
This kind of conversation and thinking is, in my view, more than ever needed (actually, well-beyond scientific circles) in times of massive media dis- or mis-information, and through-the-roof political inadequacy and irresponsibility on the biggest issues of our times: preserving the physical wonders that are nature and life (including a humanity at peace) on our pale blue dot.
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