Jean Bricmont

Jean Bricmont ( born April 12, 1952 in Uccle ) is a Belgian mathematical physicist, university lecturer and journalist. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.

Life

Was Bricmont 1977 with Jean -Pierre Antoine at the Catholic University of Leuven PhD (Les inégalités de corrélation et leurs applications aux systèmes de spins classique ) After that, he conducted research at Rutgers University and taught at Princeton University. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.

He worked on the application of renormalization group methods in probability of nonlinear partial differential equations and dynamical systems, often in cooperation with Antti Kupiainen ( see there).

He is best known as part of the Sokal affair as the author of Intellectual Impostures with Alan Sokal 1997 ( english Fashionable Nonsense ). He is also known as a political intellectual, who worked with Noam Chomsky and this in 2001 in the French press (Le Monde Diplomatique ) defended when it was heavily criticized for his advocacy for freedom of speech of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. A similar attitude also takes a Bricmont, who turned also against a law adopted by the French National Assembly (but not yet ratified ) Act ( Loi Gayssot ), the denial of genocide a punishable offense is (see Negationism ). Bricmont wrote prefaces to French editions of books by Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, Diana Johnstone ( an American living in France journalist who doubts the massacre of Serbs to Bosnians in Srebrenica ) and Gilad Atzmon.

In his book, Humanitarian Imperialism, he criticized the U.S. and its Western allies to pursue under the pretext of defending human rights, for example, in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq imperialist goals.

He is a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences. In 2002 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing ( Ergodicity and mixing of stochastic partial differential equations ).

2001 to 2006 he was president of the Association française pour l'information scientifique (AFIS ), a French company founded in 1968, against pseudoscience.

Writings

• Imperialisme humanitaire. ? Droits de l' homme, droit d' ingérence, droit du plus fort, éditions Aden 2005, 2nd edition 2009 (English: Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, Monthly Review Press, 2007, translated by Diana Johnstone )
• With Sokal Impostures, Munich, CH Beck 1999
• With Régis Debray À l' ombre des lumières: Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique, Odile Jacob, Collection Sciences, 2003.
• Julie Franck Chomsky, les cahier de l' Herne, 2007
• With Hervé Zwirn philosophy de la mécanique quantique, Vuibert, 2009
• With Noam Chomsky Raison contre pouvoir. Le pari de Pascal, L' Herne, Carnets, 2010.