Einstein said that theory is sooner or later killed by experience. That experience with which Antonio, the current Deputy Workpackage Leader for Cryogenics for the HL-LHC project and the Head of the Engineering and Mechanical Support Section, would like to contribute to the advancement of knowledge or the well-being of people.
“To feel that with the work I do every day I can contribute to something a little bigger is certainly to fulfil a dream”, says Antonio, who was born in Geneva, a city that harmoniously combines local life with openness to the world. A city of diversity in terms of nationalities, budgets and landscapes. A city that is not far from CERN, where he has been working since 1997.
Antonio continues to admire the creativity with which they solve problems at CERN, whose main objective is to serve. “We are a research centre where our main goal is clearly to create all the conditions and tools to improve fundamental knowledge, something that is not very common”. He also loves how beautiful it is to find those solutions together with others. Working as a team.
For him, beauty is in every crumb of life. It is also in the incredible things they create at CERN, things that are the product of the ingenuity, competence and hard work of many people. “I find them really beautiful, not just aesthetically, but as pieces of art because of the effort, the passion and the history behind them”, confesses Antonio.
He enjoys witnessing how ideas grow and how, when shared, they become common projects. “It is absolutely great to see this happen. It is, along with the technical challenges and the human aspect, a unique feature of CERN”, a place that also stands out for its culture of excellence.
As Ernest Hemingway, one of Antonio’s favourite writers, said: “everything, good or bad, leaves a gap when it is interrupted”, but the emptiness for something good “can only be filled by discovering something better”. Antonio, who considers himself a human being who has always been deeply interested in the study of nature, will continue to try to fill those gaps from CERN.
Because as this American journalist and novelist also wrote, “now is not the time to think about what you do not have”. It is time to think about what you can do with that, and Antonio, with all his experience and enthusiasm, will not stop dreaming of how to contribute to the well-being and development of our society.