Bernard d'Espagnat (b. Fourmagnac, Midi-Pyrénées, France, 1921) is a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality.

Quote: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."

d’Espagnat was born on August 22, 1921 in Fourmagnac, France, but spent most of his early years in Paris, where his father, a post-impressionist painter, and mother imbued him with a love of classic literature and the arts. Attending some of the finest schools in Paris, he was drawn to the humanities, especially philosophy. Despite his love of philosophy, d’Espagnat focused on science and mathematics, believing that advances in philosophy would require the knowledge and practice of contemporary science.

In 1939, as d’Espagnat made plans to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, World War II put his education on hold.

Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.

In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.