The French Scientific and Pedagogic Community Alarmed: Review of the International Symposium

On January 7–8, 2022, an event Après la déconstruction. Reconstruire les sciences et la culture (After the Deconstruction. Reconstruction of Sciences and the Culture) organized by the College of Philosophy, the Observatory of decolonialism, and the Committee Laïcité République, took place at the Sorbonne. The colloquium brought together prominent figures from around the world in the heart of Paris, in the historical Salle Louis Liard of Sorbonne University in which PhD theses are defended. Due to the constrictions of the venue — hence the COVID-19 restrictions — apart from 220 delegates to the symposium, more than 400 participants took part via the Internet. Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer delivered the opening speech. Speakers from France and the best universities of the USA, Canada, and Great Britain took part in three sessions and twelve thematic panels. Researchers, political scientists, sociologists, historians, economists, artists, and representatives of many other professions, mathematicians included, followed the lead of French philosophers present at the conference. The keynote of the symposium was the concern about the increasing politicization of science and education and the need to respond to its threats. The convention regarded the so-called woke ideology, or decolonization thinking, and cancel culture as the main threats to the world, science, and education, since this ideology may result in the cancellation of the very Western civilization. The participants discussed, darkly, pseudo-scientific approaches to the study of Islam, new taboos in mass culture, post-truth in the media, and knowledge transfer in educational training today. It was suggested that every fake or pseudoscientific paper should be countered with a scientific one, academics should back their peers confronted by student activists and university administration, resist deconstruction by transmitting knowledge and language to younger generations. The new axiological turn calls for facing the new ethics not only in everyday encounters but within the scientific discourse as well

Fuctional Illiteracy as an Axiological Problem

It is not only the illiteracy found in today’s knowledge societies, including developed countries, but also its reproduction in new generations that determines the relevance of this research. In France, one of the leading countries in Europe and the world, for decades there has been a decline in the level of general education. The trend continues despite the constant reforms of the education system, including those aimed, as their developers believe, at facilitating and updating learning. Programs in French, mathematics, history, and literature were especially lightened, or simplified, but fewer and fewer schoolchildren cope with them. University professors state that the number of students who experience difficulties in reading, writing and speaking their thoughts is growing. Official statistics report millions of functionally illiterate people who have left school. The purpose of this research is to analyze the axiological components of the French general education reforms and to study the philosophical reflections of the trend by the professional community. To exemplify and illustrate the problem there were chosen works by Barbara Lefebvre and Réne Chiche devoted to a detailed analysis of the situation in French education as of today with the focus on school education. The article aims to provide the specified data on the dynamic of functional illiteracy in France, to identify the axiological dominants that lie behind the modern reform, and to give a comprehensive analysis of the ideas expressed in the books of B. Lefebvre Génération «J'ai le droit»: La faillite de notre éducation and R. Chiche La désinstruction nationale. In both cases the authors attempt to undertake a philosophical understanding of the modern school education as one of the mechanisms for the transmission of culture that supports the formation of personality in the process of socialization. Both books clearly convey the idea that politically engaged reforms of public education, consciously or unconsciously ignoring the need to reflect on the real axiological foundations on which they are built, bring about the prospects for new, including latent, social risks

Nonlocal stabilization of nonlinear beams in a self-focusing atomic vapor

We show that ballistic transport of optically excited atoms in an atomic vapor provides a nonlocal nonlinearity which stabilizes the propagation of vortex beams and higher order modes in the presence of a self-focusing nonlinearity. Numerical experiments demonstrate stable propagation of lowest and higher order vortices over a hundred diffraction lengths, before dissipation leads to decay of these structures.Comment: 3 figure

On radiative damping in plasma-based accelerators

Radiative damping in plasma-based electron accelerators is analyzed. The electron dynamics under combined influence of the constant accelerating force and the classical radiation reaction force is studied. It is shown that electron acceleration cannot be limited by radiation reaction. If initially the accelerating force was stronger than the radiation reaction force then the electron acceleration is unlimited. Otherwise the electron is decelerated by radiative damping up to a certain instant of time and then accelerated without limits. Regardless of the initial conditions the infinite-time asymptotic behavior of an electron is governed by self-similar solution providing unlimited acceleration. The relative energy spread induced by the radiative damping decreases with time in the infinite-time limit

Stability of two-dimensional spatial solitons in nonlocal nonlinear media

We discuss existence and stability of two-dimensional solitons in media with spatially nonlocal nonlinear response. We show that such systems, which include thermal nonlinearity and dipolar Bose Einstein condensates, may support a variety of stationary localized structures - including rotating spatial solitons. We also demonstrate that the stability of these structures critically depends on the spatial profile of the nonlocal response function.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Analysis of an atom laser based on the spatial control of the scattering length

In this paper we analyze atom lasers based on the spatial modulation of the scattering length of a Bose-Einstein Condensate. We demonstrate, through numerical simulations and approximate analytical methods, the controllable emission of matter-wave bursts and study the dependence of the process on the spatial dependence of the scattering length along the axis of emission. We also study the role of an additional modulation of the scattering length in time.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Single-Cycle High-Intensity Electromagnetic Pulse Generation in the Interaction of a Plasma Wakefield with Nonlinear Coherent Structures

The interaction of coherent nonlinear structures (such as sub-cycle solitons, electron vortices and wake Langmuir waves) with a strong wake wave in a collisionless plasma can be exploited in order to produce ultra-short electromagnetic pulses. The electromagnetic field of a coherent nonlinear structure is partially reflected by the electron density modulations of the incident wake wave and a single-cycle high-intensity electromagnetic pulse is formed. Due to the Doppler effect the length of this pulse is much shorter than that of the coherent nonlinear structure. This process is illustrated with two-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations. The considered laser-plasma interaction regimes can be achieved in present day experiments and can be used for plasma diagnostics.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Almost-Euclidean subspaces of ℓ1N\ell_1^N via tensor products: a simple approach to randomness reduction

It has been known since 1970's that the N-dimensional $\ell_1$-space contains nearly Euclidean subspaces whose dimension is $\Omega(N)$. However, proofs of existence of such subspaces were probabilistic, hence non-constructive, which made the results not-quite-suitable for subsequently discovered applications to high-dimensional nearest neighbor search, error-correcting codes over the reals, compressive sensing and other computational problems. In this paper we present a "low-tech" scheme which, for any $a > 0$, allows to exhibit nearly Euclidean $\Omega(N)$-dimensional subspaces of $\ell_1^N$ while using only $N^a$ random bits. Our results extend and complement (particularly) recent work by Guruswami-Lee-Wigderson. Characteristic features of our approach include (1) simplicity (we use only tensor products) and (2) yielding "almost Euclidean" subspaces with arbitrarily small distortions.Comment: 11 pages; title change, abstract and references added, other minor change