Physicists From Italy

"Interviewer: Are you looking for God? Gianotti: No. I don’t think physics will ever be able to answer that question. Science and religion are separate disciplines, though not mutually exclusive. You can be a physicist and have faith, or you may not. It’s best for God and science to keep a healthy distance. Interviewer: But you’ve called the Higgs bison "the God particle". Gianotti: No scientist has ever dared to describe it in such terms. We owe this to the publisher of the book written by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman. He wanted to cloak the work in a literary veil that would certainly make an impact. Lederman had suggested another title, *The Damned Particle*, because it had driven us to despair; we had been searching for it for decades. It is undoubtedly a special particle, but to liken it to God is nonsense."

"Si, io credo in Dio. Non ci sono contraddizioni tra scienza e fede, l’importante è lasciare i due piani separati: essere credenti o non credenti, non è la fisica che ci darà una risposta. La scienza si basa sulla dimostrazione sperimentale e la religione si basa su principi completamente opposti, cioè sulla fede, tanto più benemerito chi crede senza aver visto."

"In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross sections had been different from what they are by a factor of two."

"I remember having listened to Fermi’s discussions on hydrodynamics with von Neumann. (These took the strange form of competitions before Fermi’s office blackboard as each tried to solve the problem under study first; von Neumann, with his unmatched lightning-fast analytical skill, usually won)."

"In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many....Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs."

"If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb."

"When you change the culture of a company, it's never a revolution. It's an evolution."

"As a father, professional, and citizen, I dream of a more precise Italy, one that does not die of imprecision."

"Strategy isn't something you define once and follow forever. It’s like a white line on the road: you keep adjusting."

"Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, innovators know that there are no shortcuts to hard work."

"I am a government employee, I do what the government tells me to do. The only thing they will never convince me of is that I should be a conscientious objector to those who pay my salary. That's nonsense."

"The world is full of radical chic environmentalists and it is full of extreme, ideological environmentalists, who are worse than the climate catastrophe we are hurtling towards if we don't do something sensible."

"Imagine an onion. The center is the people. The layer outside is the product. The external layer is the process. The process makes sense when you have a product, and it's only through the motivation of the people that you make a product. This is the way I see the company. And if you see the company this way, you have to start with the people."

"Cingolani's position on fourth-generation nuclear energy is similar to ours: that nuclear energy does not exist and there is insufficient data to determine whether it is a valid solution."

"If this same balance, even though corporeal, were considered to be not on the earth's surface but in the highest regions beyond the sun's sphere, then the threads, while still drawn to the centre of the earth, would be very much less convergent to each other, would be quasi-parallel. Let us imagine a mechanical balance transported beyond the starry balance [i.e., the constellation of that name] in the firmament, to an infinite distance. It will be understood by everybody that the suspension threads would no longer be convergent, but would be exactly parallel. ... The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions [operationes] by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?"

"Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?"

"Many have argued that a vacuum does not exist, others claim it exists only with difficulty in spite of the repugnance of nature; I know of no one who claims it easily exists without any resistance from nature."

"Sola enim Geometria inter liberales disciplinar acriter exacuit ingenium, idoncumque reddit ad civitates exornandas in pace et in bello defendendas: caeteris enim paribus, ingenium quod exercitatum sit in Geometrica palestra, peculiare quoddam, et virile robur habere solet: praestabitque semper, et antecellet, circa studia architecturae, rei bellicae, nauticaeque, etc."

"The Bible and Eastern religions have always attracted people of various backgrounds who have wanted to recognize extraordinary anticipations of cosmology and atomic physics in sacred texts. I remain deeply skeptical on this point."

"Fermi was somewhat skeptical about the possibility of an extraterrestrial civilization so technologically advanced that it could freely move between the stars. One of his favorite arguments was that such a civilization would be able to colonize the entire Galaxy in less than 300 million years, a short time compared to its age of about 15 billion years. That civilization should have already reached Earth, leaving appreciable traces. But since these traces were not found, Fermi came to the conclusion that the hypothetical civilization does not exist."

"I have absolutely no proof, but I believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the cosmos. I think it would be an unjustifiable waste to create an endless and varied universe like ours that had terrestrial life as its sole final result."

"Not even mathematics can be considered as a closed and complete system of axioms and theorems. The mathematical world is inexhaustible, no finite set of postulates and deductions will ever be able to give us the answer to all questions. Gödel's theorem, whose statement dates back to about half a century ago, brutally put an end to all attempts to condense mathematics into a list of axioms from which the truth or falsity of each of its assertions should follow. If the same mathematical language that physics uses to describe the world remains intrinsically incomplete, it is not reasonable to expect that the universe can be describable starting from a finite set of natural laws. The incompleteness of mathematics and consequently that of physics is repugnant to many, but it must be said that for the exact sciences, Gödel's theorem is by no means a defeat: on the contrary, it provides us with an intellectual push towards ever broader and more fruitful developments."

"As far as we know, entropy increases throughout the portion of the universe observable from Earth. It does not seem probable to us, but in any case nothing excludes, that beyond the particle horizon which marks the maximum limit of observations there exist regions in which the arrow of time is reversed compared to ours and in which entropy decreases. I dare not think of the theoretical and observational complications that would arise if the matter contained in one of these anomalous regions began to interact with ours."

"I am convinced that the race backwards in space and time, to the origins of the Big Bang and the elementary structure of matter, is infinite; logically and spatially inaccessible. I therefore believe that the quarks that make up electrons and protons are not the most elementary particles at all; similarly, there is no single chain of events that led from the Big Bang to us, but an infinity of equally plausible possibilities. Mine is still a faith, because I have no proof of anything."

"Man is a product of Darwinian evolution. His mental structure and logical categories have been profoundly influenced by the struggle for survival in the nature in which he evolved. In particular, we know in greater detail and intuitively those natural laws and mathematical rules that allow us to survive. This basic approach imposes on us a substantially anthropomorphic vision of the world around us."

"When I met John Paul II, I felt that history was offering us a unique opportunity: to heal a rift that had divided science and faith for centuries."

"When we speak of "paradise," we must not fall into the trap of imagining it as a physical place with human or earthly characteristics. Paradise is not a place we can describe using the categories we use for our world, such as space, time, matter or energy. These are dimensions of reality that we know and study with science, but paradise goes beyond these limits. Science teaches us that the universe is governed by physical laws that regulate space, time, mass, energy and electrical charges. But what if there is a dimension or reality beyond these laws? We cannot rule out the possibility that a reality might exist outside the co-ordinates of space and time, a reality in which the notions of matter and energy, as we understand them, have no meaning. In the context of this reflection, paradise can be conceived as a reality that transcends all the physical laws of the universe. A reality that is not subject to the limitations of our earthly experience and that cannot be represented with human images or concepts. It is a dimension of existence that, by its very nature, is totally different from everything we know, and for this very reason we cannot imagine it as something anthropomorphic, that is, in our likeness."

"Pope Francis was a pontiff who knew how to speak to the heart of humanity with the strength of simplicity, reminding us that the Creator of Heaven and Earth is not distant from our frailties, but walks with us."

"Official Facebook profile (in Italian; September 13, 2024)"

"If we were children of chaos, the fundamental laws of nature could not exist."

"Over the course of ten thousand years, from the dawn of civilization to the 16th century, all cultures had deluded themselves into thinking they knew how to decipher the Book of Nature without ever posing a single question to Its Author. That is why no culture had been given the privilege of discovering a fundamental Law of Nature."

"Man is not just another animal. Our species possesses something unique, a privilege that distinguishes us from all other life forms: Reason."

"If I deny the existence of the transcendental sphere, then everything is exhausted in the immanent and the most rigorous component of logic, thus the mathematical structure, should prove the theorem of the denial of God [...]. Why can science never discover God? Because, if science discovered God, God would be the greatest discovery of all time, but it would not be God, because God is everything; science can only discover the fundamental components of immanent reality. [...] Since science discovers that there is a rigorous logic that governs the world from its smallest structures, such as the structure of the proton [...], at the boundaries of the cosmos, if there is a rigorous logic, it is legitimate to ask, "Will there be an author of this logic?"."

"Certainly heaven is something we all need, however, we should not imagine it anthropomorphically. [...] I believe that we certainly cannot rule out the possibility of an existence outside of space and time, mass, energies and charges. In heaven there can be anything but that."

"Golden beauty is not just art. It is pure geometry. It is visual physics. It is found in the regular pentagon, where the ratio of the side of the inscribed star to the side of the pentagon is exactly 62% and 38%: the two segments of a line divided according to the golden section."

"When it comes to the Big Bang, many believe that simply evoking that primordial explosion is enough to explain the origin of the world. But the issue is much deeper than that. Before the Big Bang, the fundamental laws of Nature had to be created: space, time, mass, energy, charges."

"Science and faith are not in conflict; they are expressions of the two components of which we are made: the transcendent and the immanent."

"As a believing scientist [...] it is my deep conviction that it is our task to search nature and the universe, as Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, did, for the footprints of God."

"How does the world recognizes England, the United Kingdom, as the country that gave birth to the modern age? It was not Newton but Galilei who opened the Moderna age."

"In Western Culture, starting from Phidias and the Parthenon, the Golden Section and the Golden Number are present, consciously or unconsciously, in very famous works. In the Renaissance, after the rediscovery of Fibonacci, it was a symbol of aesthetic perfection to be used in architecture and art with, among others, Leonardo da Vinci (1542-1519) and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). The Golden Number is in many geometric figures making them Golden. We have it among other things in the octagonal architecture of Castel del Monte. The Golden ratio enters the pentagon which is Golden because the side of the star and the side of the pentagon are in the ratio of 38% and 62%, as required by the Golden Number."

"The theory of evolution by Darwin does not explain how this transition occurred, from inert matter to living matter and then to the only form of living matter endowed with reason, which is man. It is not scientifically rigorous. A rigorous scientific theory meets the requirements of scientific rigor of Galileo, who was the father of science: mathematical description and experimental reproducibility. Requirements that evolutionary theory does not meet, precisely because it cannot describe nor even less reproduce the transition from nonliving matter to living species, plant and animal. It cannot answer the question of why among millions of species, only one, the human being, is endowed with reason. The science of life has not figured out how life arises; it is not an exact science."

"Biological evolutionism claims to be considered a science. However, we must ask: What is the hard evidence that supports it? In laboratories around the world, some even secret, attempts are being made to answer fundamental questions such as the transition from inert matter to living matter, but definitive answers still do not exist.Evolutionism tells us about processes that take millions of years, but without a rigorous mathematical basis or reproducible experiments, we cannot consider it a Galilean science. True scientific rigor requires tangible evidence, not just words. It is crucial for human progress to distinguish between what is science and what is unproven theory."

"The theory of evolution, as formulated by Darwin, is an important contribution to our understanding of the variety of the living world. However, it must be clearly stated that this theory is not scientifically rigorous in the Galilean sense of the term. True science - the kind that Galileo made great - is based on two fundamental requirements: mathematical description and experimental reproducibility."

"Armed with the most advanced mathematics and a good dose of imagination, a generation of theoretical physicists conceived the idea that the universe must have undergone a transformation, after a tenth of a billionth of a second from the Big Bang. At that instant, the entire structure of space-time crystallized into a new form, following a phase transition, just as water turns into ice below zero degrees. [...] The same physicists also realized that this idea so suggestive as to sound like science fiction implied the existence of a new particle, a granule of the substance that permeates all of space-time. Data presented yesterday at Cern show that that particle-the Higgs boson - really exists, corroborating the fantastic story of the cosmic phase transition."

"The discovery of the Higgs boson was a fantastic achievement, but not enough to answer all the questions in particle physics. It was a bit like walking into a three-star restaurant and being served soup. We theoretical physicists confidently await a more tantalizing second course."

"It is undeniable that today the verifiability of the multiverse appears extremely arduous."

"Gian Francesco Giudice: The Big Bang understood as the event that created the hot, dense gas of cosmic matter was not an explosion starting from a point in space. If it had been, we could detect traces of that initial point today. Instead, astronomical observations teach us that the primordial matter gas was incredibly uniform and homogeneous. This indicates that the universe in its infancy was like a giant pot of well-mixed soup. The Big Bang is the event in which this soup was created, not at any special point, but homogeneously everywhere in the pot. It is a uniform transition that involved a very large, perhaps even infinite, region of space that was suddenly filled with matter. Understanding the Big Bang means understanding what caused this transition. Journalist: And before the Big Bang, what was there? Gian Francesco Giudice: Today it is thought that before the Big Bang there was only empty space. A very special empty space, however. There was no matter, but the fabric of space was imbued with a form of energy called precisely vacuum energy capable of exerting repulsive gravity. The effect is quite amazing because it is the exact opposite of the force of gravity we are used to, which can only attract material bodies."

"As quoted in Laura Martellini, The Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi and feminicides: «The mathematics of the fifth century Hypatia victim of a patriarchal mentality that still survives today" (28 November 2023)"

"The story of Hypatia has greatly affected the collective imagination, even outside the circle of experts. She is a scientist who is killed also because a woman who was not in her place, had a public life, spoke in public and took public positions. We must never be sure that the development of science is unstoppable. Blindly trusting in the inevitability of the need that technological development has for scientific development can be a tragic mistake. The Romans preserved Greek technology without much concern for Greek science, and the Christian fanatics led by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria calmly tore Hypatia to pieces without caring at all about the long-term consequences, rather rejoicing in the disappearance of profane knowledge considered useless, if not harmful."

"The existence of God cannot be used as any scientific hypothesis: it is something different that transcends science. [...] I would be a terrible theologian if I tried to do an experiment to prove the existence of God, and a terrible scientist if I tried to explain my experimental data by hypothesizing the existence of God. [...] I'm always annoyed when people ask me about my religious opinions in interviews. I don't think they ever ask that of footballers, singers, models, categories for which I have the utmost respect. Interviewers implicitly assume that scientists possess privileged knowledge of God, but this is not true."