Big Bang, the Call of Origins is a documentary blending science and philosophy, featuring well-known names in astrophysics. It takes us on a journey to discover our farthest roots and prompts us to reflect on the deep connection between the Universe’s past and our own existence.
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is one of the most famous works by Paul Gauguin. Painted in Tahiti in 1897-1898, it is housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA. These questions are ancient and not exclusive to Gauguin; they were undoubtedly pondered by Greek philosophers and Vedic rishis behind the Upanishads. Echoes of these questions can also be found in the writings of key figures in modern science during the 20th century, many of whom had a good understanding of philosophy, such as astronomer and physicist James Jeans and Robert Oppenheimer.
Here is another illustration with the following text:
“I was born into an environment, I do not know where I came from or where I am going or who I am. This is my situation, just like yours. The fact that every human has always been in this same situation and will always be in it does not teach me anything. All we can observe ourselves regarding the burning question of our origin and our destination is the present environment.
This is why we are eager to find out everything we can about it. This is what science is all about, knowledge, understanding, that is the true source of all human spiritual effort. We try to discover everything we can about the spatial and temporal context in which our birth has placed us. And in this effort, we find joy, we find it extremely interesting (could this not be the purpose for which we are here?).”
This was the thesis put forth by Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger in 1950 in one of the four public lectures titled “Science as an Element of Humanism”. A founding figure of quantum mechanics, who worked on elucidating the nature of life and the emergence of matter in a relativistic cosmology model, he even added:
“The isolated knowledge acquired by a group of specialists in a narrow field has no value in itself; it only has value in the synthesis that connects it to all other knowledge and only to the extent that it truly contributes, in this synthesis, to answering the question: Who are we?”
A Noosphere Arising from the Dust of the Big Bang
We now know that we are at leastAccording to the often-used expression by Hubert Reeves and in the quest for our origins, we have also developed the theory of the Big Bang. In this respect, there is now a documentary that shows how 21st-century researchers echo Schrödinger’s statements and questions. Titled “Big Bang, the Call of Origins,” it was written, directed, and edited by Dominique Regueme, produced by Les Films du Hublot, with support from Pictanovo, the Hauts-de-France Region, and the City of Lille.
The documentary delves into what science reveals about our origins and how researchers today can answer these age-old questions: who are we, and where do we come from? Through astronomy, this documentary takes us on a journey to discover our most distant roots and tells the deep connection between the universe’s past and our own existence. It is a film that intertwines science and philosophy, the intimate and the universal.
The contributors include Sylvie Vauclair, Yaël Nazé, Christophe Galfard, Aurélien Barrau, Jean-Pierre Luminet, and Etienne Klein.
The documentary “Big Bang, the Call of Origins,” directed and written by Dominique Regueme, is available on DVD, VOD, and SVOD on the Capuseen platform.