Jacques Colin

Biography

Jacques Colin holds a doctorate in science from the University of Franche-Comté. He began his research at the Besançon Observatory on the measurement of time and continued on the dynamic evolution of galaxies. He spent two years at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. He was then appointed to management positions, first at the Bordeaux Observatory for 13 years, then at the Nice – Côte d’Azur Observatory for 10 years. After a year spent at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he is now Emeritus Astronomer at Sorbonne-Université and carries out his research at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. His current work focuses on cosmology: the acceleration of the expansion and the cosmological dipole. At the same time, he is completing an essay on the nature of the present moment, which is still much less well understood than that of time itself.

Conference: What is the present moment?

Almost every philosopher and many physicists have pondered the understanding of time, without coming up with a unanimously accepted definition. The situation with the present moment is worse, for very few philosophers have attempted to understand its nature, while physicists ignore it; they have no use for it, even if Einstein said he was bothered by the subject. Neuroscientists and psychologists study the conscious present moment, but the cosmic present moment remains a mystery. No representation, no metaphor gives any idea of its nature. What follows is a sketch of a theory of this mystery.