Summary
Four scientists, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel, Paris), Sébastien Balibar (Laboratoire de physique statistique, Paris), Sylvie Vauclair (Laboratoire d'astrophysique de l'observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse), and Thibault Damour (Département d'astrophysique relativiste et de cosmologie, Meudon) sum up the state of physics at the start of the 21st century and some of the challenges that face researchers: to connect the infinitely large and the infinitely small, to measure gravitational waves, and to reconcile the two great 20th-century advances in physics, Einstein's theory of space-time and quantum mechanics.
