We had extolled, in his time, Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach". "The crumpled Universe" of Luminet is as deep, by scientific, philosophical and artistic perspectives it opens, and in addition it is clearer and better written (a lot of poetry in the style). Alas, times have changed, and any newspaper worthy of the name has mentioned this masterpiece (in his time, Jacques Attali and some other "intellectuals" were excited to Hofstadter). No one is a prophet in his own country, perhaps? The press has hot throat with books Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene (not bad, the latter). But Luminet is not Anglo-Saxon it is French (although several of his books are translated into English). In any case, vertigo guaranteed! That's why. And if the Universe was only a flamboyant illusion? A black maze splashed ghosting, lined with mirrors strange virtual? If, by the magic of the structure of the cosmos, the stars that we see billions were at the zenith and the repeated reflections of only a few stars? Maybe then would there be 10 or 100 times less galaxies in the sky than see the powerful telescopes. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, might be visible in the sky several times, from other angles, with other forms apparent. And can still be, if we had an infinitely powerful telescope, we could see in the distance the bluish reflections of a small planet eerily familiar and inevitably, the Earth. Heresy? Hallucination? Not in the eyes of Jean-Pierre Luminet, astrophysicist world famous (his book on black holes is a classic). In his universe, "crumpled", the paths of light rays emitted by any source of light borrow amounts paths to reach us, each espousing the folds of cloth cosmic. "The astrophysicist honestly concedes that if the working hypothesis is dear to his mind, it is far from proven. But surprise us reveal our myopia, that is his goal. Earthlings we are blind ... Despite our telescopes, our satellites and our physics experiments, we can not really know what form the "topology", say the mathematicians, space. As the ant scurrying on the wall of a cylinder, we are unable to know whether we live in a world curve on a plane world in an infinite or finite world ... Finally we do not even know if the Universe has an edge, a boundary, a wall, much less if this question makes sense. A question asked, to say the last twenty-five centuries. Our universe finite or infinite? Archimedes, like most ancient thinkers, inclined towards the finish. We see the contradiction come. If the Universe is carried by the vacuum, what is the reason for this gap? 2,000 years later, mathematicians are flying to the aid of physicists. The new geometries introduced in the nineteenth century, but offer finite universe without limits, without board. How is this possible? We must first abandon the idea that poisoned our vision, as defined in our eyes, the world is reality. Accept that mathematics can give us a perception of the tool much more powerful world that our senses. The best example is the surface of a sphere. It is finite, measurable, but has no boundary. Why should it not the same for the universe? And Luminet, inhabited since childhood by a strange obsession with understanding the shape of the cosmos, fascinated by the image of a "world-mollusk" built by Einstein in the framework of the theory of relativity, leads us on the slopes and breathtaking curves topology. One consequence of such a folded space, Dizzy on itself, is that the actual universe would be smaller in size, the apparent world! Exactly the opposite of what we think intuitively ... Not always easy, this extraordinary book deserves a visit indeed shaped looping in eleven dimensions.
