Bernard Guy

Bernard Guy
Born	(1952-03-14) March 14, 1952 Grenoble, France
Residence	Saint-Étienne, France
Nationality	French
Alma mater	École des Mines de Paris, University of Paris VI
Known for	Space, Time, Motion, Thermodynamics, Earth Sciences
Awards	Arthur Iberall Gold Medal (2020)
Scientific career
Fields	Engineer, Geologist, Philosophy of science

Bernard Guy (born 1952 in Grenoble, France) is a French geologist, engineer and philosopher of science. He is an emeritus research director at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, where he spent his career and once directed the geology department. Trained as a mining engineer and geochemist, Guy is best known outside the earth sciences for his heterodox work on the concepts of time, space and movement and their place in the theory of relativity. He has described himself as "a kind of combination of a geologist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science."

Biography

Guy was born in 1952 in Grenoble. He studied at the École des Mines de Paris, qualifying as a civil mining engineer (ingénieur civil des mines, 1974) and as a mining geologist (ingénieur géologue, 1977). He obtained a doctorate in engineering (docteur-ingénieur) from the same school in 1979 and a state doctorate (doctorat d'État / docteur ès sciences) from the Université Paris VI (Pierre and Marie Curie University) in 1989.

He joined the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne as a researcher and teacher in the 1970s and remained there for his entire career. He served as director of the geology department from 1989 to 2000 and later coordinated earth-sciences and environment activities within the Carnot Mines / Institut Mines-Télécom network. He has taught general geology, geophysics, thermodynamics, physics, epistemology and ethics, and has been a visiting professor at universities including Bloomington (Indiana), Cluj-Napoca, Sapporo, Kraków, Louvain-la-Neuve, Barcelona, Beijing and Moscow. He is now an emeritus research director (directeur de recherche émérite).

Scientific contributions

Guy's earth-science research has covered sedimentology and geological mapping (Alps of Haute-Provence), inversion of geomagnetic data (with Vincent Courtillot and Jean-Luc Le Mouël at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris), the geomorphology of weathering formations on peridotites in New Caledonia, and the petrology and geochemistry of skarns in the Pyrenees, which was the subject of his doctoral theses. He has also worked on thermodynamics and mathematics applied to geology, self-organization phenomena (columnar jointing of basalts, Forbes ogives in glaciers, banded skarns), fluid–rock interaction modelling with application to the petroleum industry and CO₂ storage, the structure of phase diagrams (using linear programming and matroid theory), the geochemistry of cements and polluted soils, and the mathematical modelling of biological reactions.

Alongside this mainstream scientific work, Guy has developed a distinctive line of research in the epistemology of geology and the foundations of physics. He argues that the conceptual separation of space and time has become an obstacle to physical thought and proposes instead to begin from movement: in his view the concepts of time and space cannot be defined independently of one another, so the parameters describing them are mathematically linked. He has expressed this through the formula that "time is the other name of space," and has explored its consequences for the interpretation of the Lorentz transformation and special relativity. This work places Guy as a mainstream academic holding heterodox views on the nature of time.

Honors

• Arthur Iberall Gold Medal (2020), awarded at the Thermodynamics 2.0 international conference (United States) in recognition of his work on the links between the concepts of space, time and movement in relation to the theory of relativity.

Articles

• modified gravitation
• lorentz transformation and time (in French)
  
• thinking of space and time together (in French, English abstract)
  

Abstracts

• 2012 - "Degr? z?ro des lois physiques; consid?rations heuristiques" (Read in full)
• 2011 - "Time and Space are of the Same Stuff" (Read in full)
• 2010 - "Les relations de Lorentz et le temps: proposition d?utilisation d?un param?tre temporel tri-dimensionnel d?fini par un d?placement La question du temps en physique" (Read in full)
• 2010 - "A Modified Law of Gravitation taking Account of the Relative Speeds of Moving Masses. A Preliminary Study" (Read in full)
• 2010 - "Penser ensemble l'espace et le temps (Thinking of Space and Time Together)" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "'Time is the Other Name of 'Space' (Summarized Approach)"
• 2008 - "Time is the Other Name of Space: A Philosophical, a Physical and a Mathematical Space-Time" (Read in full)

External links

• Bernard Guy biographical notice (Annales des Mines, in French)
• Bernard Guy at Academia.edu
• Bernard Guy on ResearchGate