Social Sciences and Humanities > Home > Art and Science > Issue
Guest editor
Nicolas Reeves, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Beyond its practical and functional aspects, all architecture fundamentally stems from a poetic structure that summons a web of sensory, historical, and symbolic relationships, anchoring it to a place, a history, a line of thought, or the memory of an event. The Hubert-Reeves Science Library, part of the Université de Montréal’s new MIL campus, is no exception. By offering a personal and geopoetic interpretation of the library, this article seeks to elucidate the trajectories connecting it to the ideas of the renowned astrophysicist — whose son is the author — as well as to his values, his relationship with the world, and the imaginary of the Quebec landscape. The MIL campus is thus approached as a form of geophysical architecture, employing an explicitly mineral vocabulary of geodes, topographies, fault lines, strata and crystals. It appears to emerge from the tectonic imaginaries that shape the territory, drawing a map where the local and the cosmological, the ephemeral and the immemorial, collide and converge. The library’s two gardens — small, tree-filled craters carved into an elevated ground plane — serve as transplanted fragments of Mount Royal, the magmatic landform that hosts the university’s historic campus. They form the project’s living, poetic heart. The library can thus be read as a geology of knowledge: a subterranean stratum where insights from the crystalline structures above settle and transform, much like fertile sediment preparing the ground for future harvests. It also makes palpable a resonance, a link forged between human thought, the landscape, outside, but one arising from the very heart of the flows of matter and memory to which he, like all of us, owes his existence.
I was lucky enough to meet Hubert Reeves on 1965 when he arrived in France. He then accepted to be my thesis advisor. Hubert was both a brightest scientist, science popularizer and ecologist. This short article evokes his two most important discoveries in nuclear astrophysics such as the origin of the light elements (lithium, beryllium and boron) and that of the isotopes of hydrogen and helium and lithium 7. The ways by which Hubert undertook his researches and popularizes them are also presented.
This article traces the essential role of music in Hubert Reeves’s life, work and commitments. Drawing on his writings, his collaborations with musicians, and the performances created with the author and her Ensemble Calliopée, it shows how music, science, poetry and transmission are intertwined within a shared sensitive experience of the cosmos and nature.
2026
Volume 26- 10
Issue 12025
Volume 25- 9
Issue 12024
Volume 24- 8
Special issue2023
Volume 23- 7
Issue 12022
Volume 22- 6
Issue 12021
Volume 21- 5
Special issue2020
Volume 20- 4
Special issue2019
Volume 19- 3
Issue 12018
Volume 18- 2
Issue 12017
Volume 17- 1
Issue 1