Stardust by Hubert Reeves

I still remember the sort of dizziness that assailed me. I was leaving an auditorium at the University of Montreal where Hubert Reeves had addressed an audience made up mainly of students like me.

“We are all stardust,” he told us with his eternal little bright eyes and that slight smile that never left him.

I had already read the sentence in his books. And I knew that the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen atoms that make up living things were formed in the hearts of stars billions of years ago, then catapulted into the Universe during supernovae.

But hearing Hubert Reeves say it in his soft and distinctive voice hit me in the plexus.

Suddenly, his statement was more than a magnificent sentence (and it is quite one, it must be said). It was also more than scientific information. It was something I felt.

Between the university building and my tiny dorm room on the same campus, I looked up at the sky to see stars. I must have seen two or three of them through the city lights. It was enough to make me feel the immensity of the cosmos. And to feel, in comparison, my extreme, absurd and almost exhilarating smallness.

I had just tasted the magic touch of Hubert Reeves.

Since the announcement of his death on Friday, there has been much talk that Hubert Reeves was a great popularizer. It’s undeniable. The astrophysicist is one of those researchers who have chosen to leave the restricted circle of their peers to share their knowledge with the general public. He will always be a giant of popular science.

But the term popularizer seems almost reductive to me as it obscures a fundamental dimension of his work.

Because Hubert Reeves did much more than make us understand notions about the cosmos and, later, about nature and the ecological crisis.

He spoke to our emotions in a way few scientists have.

You just need to have read his books or listened to his lectures to understand that when Hubert Reeves shared his knowledge, it was with the aim of transmitting to us something even more important to him: his wonder at the Universe. .

“I wanted to give something to contemplate and understand,” he wrote on the back cover of Starduststating that this book “would like to be an ode to the universe”.

In my case, the trick worked so well that this book, along with others, helped propel me toward the study of physics that occupied much of my young adult life.

Hubert Reeves’ ecological turn is part of the same desire to communicate his attachment to the beauty of the Earth and his concerns about the fragility of ecosystems.

“Attentive to sounds and smells, I awaken to the tranquil presence of the plant world. I feel alive, on the surface of planet Earth, at the present moment of the evolution of the universe,” he writes in Malicornebridging the gap between astronomy and ecology with this always very personal look.

Underneath the scientific concepts which could have been complex and disembodied, there was always this return to the human, to what we are, to the way in which the world challenges us and makes us vibrate. Hubert Reeves wanted to make us understand in order to make us feel.

For me, his masterpiece remains his first popular book for adults, Patience in the azure, as a summary of what he will develop in his subsequent works. I completely wore out my copy from leafing through it and pushing it into the hands of my friends. I didn’t find it on Friday – I hope whoever kept it read it and liked it.

By telling us that we are stardust, Hubert Reeves made us realize that we are nothing more than collections of atoms. Brief temporary structures whose components, like Lego blocks, were used to make other structures before us and will take other forms after we die.

It is now Hubert Reeves’ turn to return to nature the atoms made in the stars which allowed him to live 91 years on Earth.

The wonder he passed on to us remains. Just like this feeling of better understanding – and better appreciating – our place in the Universe.