Courrier
Letter to the Editor (response to Y. Gingras)
Scott Walter
walter [at] univ-nancy2.fr
Published in Isis 99(2), 2008, 374
On behalf of the scientific advisory board for Philippe Thomine's
short biopic of Henri Poincaré, a board composed of four scholars
affiliated with the Henri Poincaré Archives in Nancy, France (CNRS,
UMR 7117), I wish to respond to Yves Gingras's essay review of this
film (Isis, June 2007). While Prof. Gingras allows that the board
played only an advisory role in the film's production, he erroneously
lists the Poincaré Archives as a co-producer. The board validated the
film's script, and stands by its decision. Contrary to Gingras'
description of the film as a piece of cleverly subversive,
state-sponsored Einstein-bashing, Thomine's entertaining and
instructive documentary is centered on Poincaré's contributions to
science, including the discovery of a class of automorphic functions
called Fuchsian functions, the identification of a class of
doubly-asymptotic (chaotic) orbits in the restricted three-body
problem of celestial mechanics, the foundations of algebraic topology,
and his conventionalist philosophy of science. Thomine accomplished
all this on a shoestring budget, funded for the most part by the
Lorraine Region (from whence Poincaré hailed), in the interest of
prompting scientific and technical vocations among high-school
students. In light of the film's target audience, modest budget
(110,000 Euros, tax incl.), duration (26 minutes), and distribution
(on a French educational channel at 5 a.m., DVD and streaming video),
it does not warrant Gingras' carping review.
Let me also rectify Gingras' contention that the Poincaré Archives
seeks "to promote Poincaré on the national and international
scenes." The original letter in French, published in L'Express (on
6 Dec. 2004) by the Poincaré Archives' director in response to an
inane charge of plagiary leveled against Einstein by a former French
Minister of Education, reads as follows: "L'exaggération du rôle de
Poincaré dans l'élaboration de la théorie de la relativité ne peut que
compromettre nos efforts de mise en valeur, au niveau national et
international, de ce grand savant." I'm not certain of what a
Québécois understands by "mettre en valeur," but in France, this
means to show the value of, or to display the qualities of something.
For the record, the
Henri-Poincaré Archives
seeks to make Poincaré's published and
unpublished work accessible to scholars and students worldwide. Is
this not the historian's task? Is it not also the duty of the
historian of science to give guidance to documentary filmmakers? It
would be a shame if Gingras' shortsighted essay were to lead
historians of science to disengage from the production of
documentaries, which are an important vector for understanding of
science in broader circles.