Physicist Lydéric Bocquet, 54, is accelerating. For several months, this jovial researcher has had a series of successes, only a part of which would fill any scientist with ease. In December 2022, he enters the Academy of Sciences. In January, he signs an article in Sciencehis second, which adds to the eight published in Nature and to the thirty-four in Physical Review Letters, the reference journal in physics. In February, for one year, he begins his courses at the College de France to the Liliane Bettencourt Chair in Technological Innovation. 1is April, a project funded by the very selective European Research Council began (this is the third time that it has won such funding, a rare success in France). Finally, this CNRS silver medalist (in 2017) is fine-tuning the creation of a fifth start-up, code name Shadok, because these facetious characters have invented a colander that lets the spaghetti pass but not the water…
“That’s exactly what we want to achieve: to use the bizarre laws that govern fluids at nanoscales to make these complex strainers of Shadoks. (…) And we are beginning to know how to do it. Thanks to the emerging laws of fluids at nanoscales », summarized Lydéric Bocquet during his inaugural lesson, citing these fictional heroes, unaccustomed to the solemnity of these places. And revealing its current specialty, “plumbing” in nanometric pipes, ie of the order of a billionth of a meter.
In this impassioned speech, another reference – even more unexpected – slipped: the singer Anne Sylvestre. “Where I am afraid, I will go”she said in The world in 2018, a maxim taken up by the speaker to deliver an original vision of his journey.
The riskiest paths
Certainly, as a former amateur rugby third line, he likes, as they say, to put his head where others would not put their hands. But that fear is a good advisor in science is surprising. “If fear paralyzes, it can also be quite exhilarating and driving. Because she carries the desire to make her way to an unknown land, by the most risky paths (…). The taste for risk, facing one’s fear, is what researchers and scientific research are all about. [Il] arouses in us a powerful desire to understand and, to tell the truth, it is precisely very exciting not to know”he justified in his lesson.
“Lydéric is fearless and does not walk the beaten track”, sums up Sophie Marbach, a former PhD student, now a CNRS researcher at Sorbonne University. His scientific career can thus be read as a succession of overcome obstacles, theoretical and above all experimental. Trained in statistical physics and plasmas (hot soups of particles), he was first interested, in his laboratory in Lyon, in granular media and then in the flow of fluids in very narrow pipes. On this phenomenon, “There was frustration, because the theory existed but we couldn’t measure friction on such small scales. So we imagined an original experiment to achieve this.”remembers this handyman who, as a child, near Lens, tweaked robots and computers to create sound systems that frightened his grandmother.
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