The poet and philosopher George Santayana believed that pleasure is the central aesthetic category and beauty is nothing more than “pleasure seen as the quality of a thing”. If pleasure is relative, each of us will experience it differently.
There is a group of people who live in wonder at being able to describe and predict the behaviour of Nature using mathematical equations. These people are physicists, and Thibaut is one of them.
He has been working as an accelerator physicist at CERN since January 2001. He thinks that those who observe and measure Nature have a need to love it, as well as the beauty it contains.
Almost twenty years have passed and the best of his work is still the “social collisions”. But, in addition to the interactions with others and the teamwork spirit, designing beam instruments, which is what Thibaut has been doing since he landed here, is something else he likes very much about his work.
Thibaut was born in Bordeaux, the port city in the south west of France that Odilon Redon and Albert Marquet painted, each in their own way. He studied physics there, then did his PhD at the CEA/CESTA (Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique / Centre d’Etudes Scientifiques et Techniques, d’Aquitaine).
What he misses most from there (besides family and old friends) is undoubtedly the ocean. He grew up next to it and enjoyed going to the beach, swimming and surfing. “When you are at sea riding waves, you appreciate what the sea gives you and also what the freedom is in this case”, he believes.
Even with freedom, as with the temperature or the autumn rains, there are also different degrees. One of them (which may be one of the highest) is freedom by the sea. Like the one he felt every day when he was young.
Thibaut considers himself very lucky. He has no big dreams, perhaps just to do things better than today and thus be a better father, a better scientist and a better human.
As the French poet, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, wrote in Les Fleurs du mal, “homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer”. Thibaut will not only appreciate his own sea, but will try to appreciate it better every day.
