Every common experience and every phenomenon that we often observe inattentively hide secrets that in the light of the laws of physics suddenly become understandable and fascinating. Professor Luisa Cifarelli was unable to resist this fascination: engaged in the research of elementary particle physics, she began her career at CERN in Geneva and has held prestigious roles over the years such as the presidency of the Fermi Center - Historical Museum of Physics and Studies and Research Enrico Fermi and SIF. We had the great pleasure of interviewing her to learn about her journey and her relationship with this fantastic discipline.
Professor, how did your passion for physics come about?
My passion for physics was born almost by chance, as a student I was good at both literary and scientific subjects. When it came time to enroll in university, a family friend suggested Engineering and I liked the idea. The faculty functioned regularly even if in Rome the student protests were in full swing and, despite being one of the very few women, I found an environment where I felt perfectly at ease. The appointment with physics took place later, when I met Professor Antonino Zichichi who told me about the Physics degree course in Bologna. I enrolled and thus my passion for this discipline was born. I prepared my thesis with him at CERN in Geneva and from there began my scientific career in particle physics which also led me to work in laboratories with accelerators such as DESY in Hamburg, Germany.
What is the branch of this discipline or the theory that still fascinates you the most today?
Definitely fundamental physics because, in my opinion, it is a discipline that allows freedom of thought and to justify so many curiosities, allowing the development of the technology which is the basis of so many extraordinary applications. I like to recall a phrase by the former general director of Cern Rolf-Dieter Heuer who said "Mobile phones don't fall from trees", to underline that behind the technological applications there are centuries of fundamental research. Here, fundamental physics is the basis of innovation.
Physics is often considered the most difficult of disciplines, in your opinion why?
Physics cannot be memorized, it must be understood, which is why it may seem difficult. To understand it you need to have a lot of curiosity, passion, desire to get to the bottom of things. I strongly believe in the importance of good teachers, often behind people who claim they didn't particularly like the subject as students there are unattractive teachers. A good teacher, in fact, is capable of transmitting not only the notions but also the passion for the discipline.
What does it mean for you to have been the first female President of the Italian Physical Society?
It was a great honor to have been the first female president of the SIF for twelve years. SIF is a non-profit association which aims to promote, encourage and protect the study and progress of Physics in Italy and in the world. Born around the magazine "Il Nuovo Cimento" in the years of the wars of independence and the Risorgimento, it was officially established in Rome in 1897: the fathers of the Society were great scientists but also great patriots. The SIF awards many national and international awards and, in addition to being famous for its publications, is part of a well-established tradition whereby the best physicists receive an award from the society. As for the prizes awarded, the most prestigious is the Enrico Fermi Prize, awarded to those who have honored the discipline with his discoveries and was established on the occasion of the centenary of Fermi's birth.
The Higgs boson was theorized in 1964 but detected for the first time only in 2012 in experiments conducted with the LHC accelerator at CERN. Why did it take so long to arrive at experimental confirmation of the existence of the "God particle"? What does the fact that its existence has been proven mean?
It took all this time because as we delve into the studies of fundamental physics we try to understand increasingly difficult things which, in order to be deciphered, require the fielding of an enormous amount of data, extremely sophisticated apparatus and accelerating machines which take decades and the work of thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians to develop. This is why a particle like the Higgs boson has been so difficult to detect, even if it has long been hypothesized by distinguished theoretical physicists. It was a remarkable undertaking both from a technological and experimental point of view and from a conceptual point of view, as it filled one of the missing pieces of the standard model which explains the intimate existence of the matter of which we are made at the level of the elementary constituents and clarifies how these constituents of nature manage to acquire mass. A curiosity: Nobel laureate Leon Lederman claimed to have given the Higgs boson the nickname of "God particle" both because it is crucial for understanding the structure of matter, and for editorial reasons: initially he called it the cursed particle (goddamn particle) because so elusive and difficult to reveal but this name was inconvenient.
How did the Historical Museum of Physics and the Enrico Fermi Study and Research Center come about and what are its activities?
The Fermi Center was founded twenty years ago with a special law to restore the building in via Panisperna, where Enrico Fermi had conducted his fundamental studies and experiments (the latter under the guidance of the famous group of the "boys of via Panisperna"), at the community of citizens and physicists. It was created with a dual purpose: on the one hand, to promote interdisciplinary research, for which we carry out studies that see the application of advanced physical techniques and methods in various sectors: in the investigation of materials of artistic and archaeological interest, and in the field of and medical therapy or in functional imaging of the brain, for example. The problems of fundamental physics and astrophysics are also addressed at the Fermi Center with innovative approaches and cutting-edge technologies. The pride of the Fermi Center is in fact the “EEE – Science in the Schools” project, a true example of the so-called citizen science, which currently involves about 1000 students from upper secondary schools every year in a large experiment in astroparticle physics, combining in an original and effective science and youth education. On the other hand, the Fermi Center aims to spread scientific culture through activities and studies related to the history of physics, in particular in order to involve visitors in the discovery of physics from the Fermi years to the present, also through the establishment of the Museum dedicated to the great physicist. The museum exhibition, created in collaboration with the Italian Physics Society, highlights the extraordinary figure of Enrico Fermi and his great scientific achievements, presented with an interpretation suitable for the general public, including the very young.
Why is a genius like Enrico Fermi better known abroad than in Italy, his country of origin?
There have been very few, in the world of physics, absolute geniuses like Enrico Fermi, about one per century. The illustrious Italian physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in 1938, was a theoretical but also an experimental genius and his research on the artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons gave rise to the discoveries that led to the development and control of nuclear energy. There have been few scientists of this caliber, I would say one per century. We think of James Clerk Maxwell and even earlier we find Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei. Well, Galileo and Fermi have in common the fact that they have given illuminating contributions to the understanding and discovery of fundamental interactions, respectively the gravitational interaction and the weak nuclear interaction, but they also have in common the fact that they have undergone specific and difficult historical periods the consequences of their discoveries. For Galilei, those on the motion of the planets around the Sun, for Fermi, those on slow neutrons and the nuclear pile, with his participation in the Manhattan project. Evidently this is why we wanted to forget Fermi. The birth of the physics center in Rome that bears his name, in via Panisperna, is a deliberate act to restore the right memory and the right honor to an extraordinary character who spent half of his life in Italy.
Extreme Energy Events - Science in Schools consists of a special research activity of the Fermi Center, in collaboration with CERN, INFN and MIUR. What exactly is it about?
As mentioned before, Extreme Energy Events (EEE) – Science in Schools is a project conceived by Antonino Zichichi in 2004 to combine the most advanced research with the promotion of scientific culture among young people. This is an innovative research activity which aims to detect the muon component that reaches the ground in high-energy atmospheric showers, in particular those generated by cosmic rays which require very extensive detection equipment to be studied. Hence the idea of involving schools: the innovative aspect of the project consists in the primary role assigned to students and teachers of the schools involved in which extremely sophisticated cosmic ray detectors ("telescopes") have been installed, built and then developed directly by the students. Each telescope consists of three MRPC (Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers) chambers built by teams of teachers and students supported by researchers, in laboratories made available to them at CERN so as to make them protagonists of the entire procedure. The detectors are then transferred to schools, where they are mounted in telescopes, whose maintenance and data taking control are again the responsibility of the students assisted by their teachers. The collected data is transmitted in real time to the INFN CNAF computing center in Bologna and here reconstructed and made available to the researchers, teachers and students involved in the project. Currently the EEE project consists of more than 60 telescopes installed in as many schools throughout Italy, including the islands, thus sampling an area of almost half a million square kilometers to study coincidences between cosmic muon swarms hundreds of kilometers away. Project conferences are organized every year with the participation of students and school teachers.
What is the role of scientific dissemination today, in an era defined as "of knowledge"?
When physicists got out of the "Ivory Tower" and began to publish articles in newspapers in which they tried to explain their research to the community, they were initially viewed with suspicion, even by their colleagues. Today the situation has changed a lot, fortunately. Through a language that is understandable to non-experts, science must be able to communicate to everyone in a profound but at the same time light way, an essential condition for expanding the audience of interlocutors and creating participation. Sartre stated that words create objects, today this openness of scientific culture to different languages and modes of representation constitutes a collective resource to increase confidence in knowledge and bridge the existing gap with society. Overcoming this distance is one of the objectives of the Fermi Center which welcomes school groups and citizens with different backgrounds. In the Museum, Enrico Fermi's scientific achievements and research are presented in such a way as to be usable by the general public, including the very young, by combining traditional objects and panels in an innovative way with multimedia products, films and sounds, always through the use of simple but rigorous at the same time. Well, the dissemination of science is a challenge that cannot be avoided.
What is for you the role of creativity in science?
Without creativity there is no science! You need to have imagination, creativity is born from imagination and ideas. Science and art both need it: it often happens that artists recognize that their work is the result of research just as scientists frequently claim the role of imagination and intuition in their work.
Who was the most important person in your career path?
Definitely Professor Antonino Zichichi, also famous at CERN for being one of the few group leaders, at the time, to welcome young women. He has always firmly believed in feminine qualities, such as being multitasking, at the same time he was very attentive to the needs of those on maternity leave, giving all the necessary support to reconcile work and "care for the species". Well, it was the 2017s and it was a great help for me to have a computer terminal available at home, connected to the CERN computing center, from which I could work... this great sensitivity made him a forerunner in this sense. I also remember Professor Ida (Ducci) Ortalli with emotion, who sadly passed away in 2017. Full professor at the University of Parma, she occupied a leading role in the field of medical physics. She was intelligent, nice, cheerful, beautiful, elegant, full of charm and with a strong personality. You have helped me a lot in the activities of the Italian Physical Society which, to honor your memory, since XNUMX has named one of its awards for young female researchers after you.