(Drawing by Jean-Pierre Petit)
When I was a kid... I wanted to be an inventor.
I kept linking eclectic objects together to make them live and take a new sense. As a child, I was never bored. Always building a new "thing", testing it, improving it. Trying to make new objects out of old objects, to make them pop out of the ordinary, to respond to needs I had found, or just... invented as well.
In the same direction, as a great source of inspiration, I've always been fascinated by ingenious minds. You know those "crazy people" nobody understands until they come up with the solution of an unsolved clue, mystery or problem. Well of course, you don't have to be crazy to be ingenious, nevertheless, I wonder how Albert Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci were considered by their contemporary friends?
This said, I just remembered today a link I saved right after 9/11 back in 2001. At the time, I was really shocked by the vision of people actually jumping out of the buildings. Besides the fact it symbolized the horrible and desperate situation people went through, I thought it was unconceivable in 2001 not to have a way to save them other than from inside the towers. I made a quick search and found a strange link to french astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit's web site.
Now, that is definitely someone who leaves me full of interrogations. Right after the World Trade Center disaster, he published an "Emergency tower evacuation" page (september 17th 2001) with an idea (not to say "invention") to help people escape from a high building on fire or with blocked elevators. I must confess that when I read this... I just couldn't believe it.
Besides being a scientist, J-P Petit is a phenomenon of his own, he writes songs (in french), is an artist, paints and draws, publishes on astrophysics and cosmology, makes his site all by himself, informs, shares, jokes, communicates, and sometimes is very critic, not to say "acid" to politics, scientific and academic world, etc. Most of the site is in french, but a few pages are translated in English and can somehow give you a perspective on his personality, scientific subsite and biography.
What do you think about this kind of "imagination"?
Is his "Emergency tower evacuation" system : crazy? or incredibly great?
> What do you think about this kind of "imagination"?
It is with that kind that he produced http://www.jp-petit.org/Divers/PENTAGATE/Pentagate0.htm
Posted by: Jean-Sylvain Delroux | February 14, 2008 at 09:13 PM