Video Clip (Warning: Size is over 5Mo)
"Noms de Dieux"
©RTBF97
...La science à fondamentalement contribué à réduire les inégalités...
Professor Ilya Prigogine, a member of the Honorary Committee of PITCH, has just passed away. I cannot claim he was a friend. I simply knew him a little. But I had the chance to see him at work on a few occasions over the past 13 years, and I have quite clear memories of the moments I have spent with a very special man:
The first time, it was back in 1990. The first research contract ever to be signed between the European Commission and Russian research organisations was being prepared.
I entered his office, a huge but modestly and tastefully furnished room on the campus of the Free University of Brussels. Prior to visiting him I had been through what was to become the “technical annex” of a research grant. I was still trying to find out how one could make such a piece of computer-based modelling of elements of his chaos theory understandable by us, the average EC officials...
He asked me to sit at his large, wooden meeting table, and he came and sat next to me. In a few minutes he enlightened the works. He was admirably skilled at explaining complex things in a simple, straightforward way, only using just the words it needed. He was even more admirable for listening to me: I had to “translate” his sayings in a way that incorporate our bureaucratic constraints. Still the capability to undertake the leading edge research he wanted to conduct had to be preserved… Only his patience and his open mind, a mind open even to such insignificant things as bureaucratic rules! made it possible for me to build a convincing file.
Over the years that followed I only saw him briefly on rare occasions, including at George Metakides’ place. Professor Ilya Prigogine honoured us by accepting to support PITCH.
Another time was when preparing last year's Jubileum celebration of Professor Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel Prize. He and Professor Ioannis Antoniou had invited me to intervene during the “3rd Ilya Prigogine Seminar: Thinking Science”, organised on the occasion. I was stricken again by the light that he could cast on the most complex scientific issue; by the beauty of his words; by his wisdom. Just by listening one could “feel” him thinking and investigating, continuously, as if breathing was only secondary to the work of his mind.
The last time I saw him was in November 2002, last year. He was presenting the most recent breakthrough achieved in his laboratory: a technology to view 3D-objects “en relief” on a flat screen, without the need of any visual device. He was already sick, and he was already an old man. Still he had the energy of a young man, happy to see his theoretical work bearing even more technological fruits.
And he was a very kind man.
Michel Bosco
29 May 2003
