Amplitude

Symposium on Representations of Time

Why Amplitude?

Twice a year, the Dominique Renaud Foundation brings together a select group of guests to discuss a question that, by its very nature, has no definitive answer: What do we know about time once we stop taking it for granted?

Each edition shifts its focus. The first explored the words of writers; the second, the far reaches of the observable universe. A third will explore yet another territory, followed by a fourth: in the Foundation’s view, no single discipline has a monopoly on time—only perspectives that are successively adopted and then set aside.

Amplitude never closes the debate it opens. Speakers are not invited to deliver a masterclass or to reach a consensus among themselves: disagreement, when it arises, is often among the most fruitful moments of the gathering.

Opus I: Lived Time, Written Time

September 6, 2025, Geneva Watch Days, Geneva

The first edition of Amplitude drew a full house during Geneva Watch Days. Three writers—Sylvain Tesson, Noëlle Revaz, and François-Henri Désérable—shared their perspectives on a simple theme: “Lived Time, Written Time.” A carte blanche session, a roundtable moderated by Louise Ekland, and the announcement of a partnership with ENSCI, the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle, made up the three highlights of the event.

The entire conference, with subtitles, remains available online.

Opus II: The Time of the Universe, the Time We Imagine

September 3, 2026, 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Geneva Watch Days, Geneva

A year later, Amplitude takes a radical turn. At the Geneva Watch Days Pavilion—this time in English—four leading physicists make up the panel: Thomas Hertog, cosmologist and former colleague of Stephen Hawking at KU Leuven; Janna Levin, a professor at Barnard College (Columbia University), who recently had an 1895 telescope equipped with a mechanical celestial tracking clock restored; Katie Mack, holder of the Hawking Chair at the Perimeter Institute, whose work focuses on scenarios for the end of the universe; and Didier Queloz, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, who, along with Michel Mayor, co-discovered the first exoplanet detected outside our solar system in 1995.

Jean-Frédéric Jauslin, president of the Foundation, opened the session with a question a child might ask upon seeing an alarm clock: Is time a property of the universe, or a property of the observer? For two hours, moderated by Louise Ekland, the four speakers never quite reached agreement—and that was precisely what the Foundation had set out to achieve: not an answer, but a better-formulated question.

In the audience, Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier spontaneously took the floor, extending from the audience a discussion that, on that day, seemed unwilling to come to a close. Dominique Renaud concluded the symposium by bringing the question back to a concrete action: what does it mean to measure something whose nature remains, at its core, unknown?

The full conference, with subtitles, will be available soon.

What’s next?

Amplitude does not aim to revisit the same subject every year. Its only rule is never to repeat itself: after literature, cosmology; after cosmology, yet another different territory. The Dominique Renaud Foundation now holds two editions per year, a way of making time a living question—examined from a fresh angle at each event—rather than a thesis to be defended once and for all.