Gianotti’s second term as CERN director-general
Comments on this article in Physics Today, from November 15, 2019

by Bruce E. Camber

Most recent: Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, The European Strategy for Particle Physics and CERN’s future, June 2021 (PDF)

Dr. Fabiola Gianotti is right, “Science has no passport, no political party, no gender.” But, science does have personality, bias, and a natural intransigence.

It has an attitude. It has a belief system. And, the fundamentals of that belief system just may not reflect our so-called ‘really real’ universe as well as it could.

Perhaps Newton threw us off with his ‘absolute’ space and time. Perhaps Leibniz was closer to the truth. Remember the 1999 conference on structure formation at the Newton Institute at Cambridge when Hawking and Guth and so many others had to admit the ‘infinitely hot’ start of the universe was not adequate.

It is interesting to note that in 1927 Lemaître’s model our universe started cold.

There is still so much we don’t know and so much to learn… let’s take up the challenge to see something more fundamental than space and time (Tegmark, Turok, Arkani-Hamed). Perhaps all the dimensionless constants, plus the mathematics of Langlands programs and string theory can finally open unexpected doors for a truly mathematical definition of the Planck scale physics as a foundation for CERN-level physics.

This time around, perhaps we can bring the Planck scale and the “CERN-scale” together.

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Footnote: This page URL is: https://81018.com/gianotti/ It will replace the initial page about Fabiola Gianotti’s work at CERN. My first visit to CERN in 1977 was to chat with John Bell about the EPR Paradox. Viki Weisskopf, an acquaintance at MIT’s Physics Department, helped to arrange that meeting. -BEC