Jean-Pierre Luminet | Contributors

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Physics The Dark Matter Enigma [long_description] Unveiling the true nature of dark matter is one of the most significant challenges in modern astrophysics. In an effort to explain this enigma, three categories of theories have been developed: Cold Dark Matter, Hot Dark Matter, and Warm Dark Matter. Jean-Pierre Luminet reviews these and other attempts to confront the many unresolved questions that obscure this perplexing aspect of our universe.
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letter Closed Timelike Curves and Singularities
In response to “Time Travelers”
[short_description] Discovered in 1949 by Kurt Gödel, the homogeneous rotating universe model contains closed timelike curves and therefore allows for travel into the past, accompanied by all its paradoxes.
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Astronomy Homage to Quietanus [long_description] Jacques Mertzeisen and Jean-Pierre Luminet shed light on Johannes Remus Quietanus, a much neglected seventeenth-century astronomer and royal physician, a friend of Kepler, and one of the very first to observe a transit of Mercury.
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Astronomy The Provençal Humanists and Copernicus [long_description] In the early 17th-century, the prospects for the Copernican revolution appeared uncertain. Jean-Pierre Luminet explores how the 17th-century Provençal humanist astronomers Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Pierre Gassendi, along with Jean-Dominique Cassini and Michel de Montaigne, continued the revolution and in the process helped shape the subsequent development of Western science.
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letter LIGO and Astronomy
In response to “Across the Universe”
[short_description] Though some American astronomers were reluctant to accept that gravitational wave physics is indeed astronomy, this was not at all the case in France.
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Astronomy The Holographic Universe [long_description] How is a black hole in a 5-D anti de Sitter space like a flat 4-D field of particles and radiation? Jean-Pierre Luminet explains the holographic principle, the Maldacena conjecture, and the resolution of the information paradox.
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Astronomy Interstellar Science [long_description] The film Interstellar draws heavily from contemporary science. It makes reference to a range of topics, from established concepts such as fast-spinning black holes, accretion disks, tidal effects, and time dilation, to far more speculative ideas such as wormholes, time travel, additional space dimensions, and the theory of everything. Jean-Pierre Luminet examines how these topics were depicted.