4D Printing, Volume 1

Introduction

History teaches us that the “pioneers” always opened for others paths that they themselves did not take. (Löwith 1969)

At the heart of this standardization process, the training of young researchers, which is crucial to creative science, has been particularly targeted. Doctoral students and thesis directors are now supervised like children by doctoral schools corseted by numerous decrees and monitored by “monitoring committees” summoned to ensure the orthodoxy of their course. (Plagnol 2021)

Do you want on the greatest and most important of all things, I mean freedom, to see caprice and liberty reign? No my friend: freedom consists in wanting things to happen not as you please, but as they happen. (Epictetus 2015)

[In France], we live and think in the element of this moderately optimistic presenteeism, colored by worries, without strong beliefs, with a limited, impoverished imagination. The most derisory claims have replaced projects, social jealousy and resentment have driven out enthusiasm. (Taguieff 2021)

In 1871, Auguste Blanqui, a French theorist of revolutionary socialism, was imprisoned and wrote “Eternity By the Stars” in prison. For him, if the universe is sufficiently vast, there is a chance that any object will be reproduced somewhere identically. All we have to do is search the universe for the desired object! But what do we do if time is short? Will we be able to find the object? Undoubtedly, Blanqui was not intimately familiar with Maxwell and his ...