La science autrement

In 1951, Cécile DeWitt-Morette, a young physicist not yet thirty, founded an innovative summer school in the village of Les Houches in Haute Savoie. This social invention proved to be particularly well suited to the new theoretical physics - so disconcerting and demanding - that was developing. The School of Theoretical Physics at Les Houches quickly established itself as a key institution in world physics. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, one of the many Nobel Prize winners to have passed through Les Houches, had no hesitation in declaring that the School ‘saved his generation of physicists’. Yet outside the discipline, who knows that a village in Haute Savoie is home to a legendary institution of physics? This book explores, for the first time, using novel socio-cognitive frameworks, the workings and effects that have earned the École des Houches worldwide prestige.

Through the creative sociability of a mountain school, we discover that science itself is invented differently. At Les Houches, science is seen as a confrontation with the unknown and as a battle that attempts to mobilise participants and teachers towards new ‘collective regimes of creativity’. As a result, the fundamental mechanisms of scientific creativity and the “government” of science can be observed here much more clearly than elsewhere.

• Chipten Valibhay is a researcher-teacher at Mines Paris - Université PSL. His work focuses on the institutions that support scientific and technical creativity.

• Armand Hatchuel is Professor Emeritus at Mines Paris - Université PSL. With Benoît Weil, he developed the formal theory of creative reasoning. He is a member of the Académie des technologies.