the first European festival on creativity

2016 Programme

Event #5 BIS

Guido Tonelli

The birth of space (and time)

Through the LHC, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, we are attempting to reconstruct the first moments in the life of the universe. By returning tiny shreds of matter to their condition immediately following the Big Bang, the particles that populated the primordial universe 13.9 billion years ago can be reproduced in a laboratory. It’s a voyage back through time to the non-place everything came from, the strange singularity that gave origin to space (and time). Understanding its origin means reconstructing in detail the subtle mechanisms through which the universe around us has acquired the physical properties we are familiar with as well, perhaps, as discovering something about its end.

Guido Tonelli ,physicist at Cern in Geneva and professor at the University of Pisa, is one of the fathers of the discovery of the Higgs boson. He received the International Fundamental Physics Prize (2013), the Enrico Fermi Award of the Italian Physical Society (2013) and the Medal of Honour of the President of the Italian Republic (2014). He published La nascita imperfetta delle cose. La grande corsa alla particella di Dio e la nuova fisica che cambierà il mondo (Rizzoli, 2016, Galileo Prize), Cercare mondi. Esplorazioni avventurose ai confini dell’universo (Rizzoli, 2017), Genesi. Il grande racconto delle origini (Feltrinelli, 2019), Tempo. Il sogno di uccidere Chronos (Feltrinelli, 2021) and Materia. La magnifica illusione (Feltrinelli, 2023).

2016 Programme

Event #5 BIS

Guido Tonelli

The birth of space (and time)

An idea of public space

That place called “home”

The space of words: Helen and Odysseus

The last day of summer

The birth of space (and time)

The birth of space (and time)

The space of war. The First Italian War of Independence

Immunity and the brain: a dialogue between two chief systems. From memory to vaccines.

New males: as teenagers, in couples, as fathers

Tv series: a newly emerged continent

Across the American deserts: a voyage through 20th century collective imagination

What do algorithms think of?

That place is gone

The space of rebellion

Other maps, other worlds. Representations of space

The analyst at the movies: thinking by images

From the stars to Life: one, one hundred, one thousand Earths

Architectural space in the past, the present, the future

Families confined and without borders

The best ideas of our lives. Make room for innovation (the real kind)

The space of absence: Patroclus and Andromache

On the other side of the sea

Play it again

The space of war. The second Italian War of Independence

School is an idea of the world

Asperger Talk Show

Let’s make space for stupidity

Voyages through spaces real and imagined

Is there space for us all? The future of European migrations

When painters left their studios to paint en plein air

The memory of space. The rubble of climate and rubbish in our homes

Graffiti, tags and murals: when art extends to walls

The poetry of space. Words and drawings on that place we call home

The river is never wrong

Mirror neurons: anatomy of a revolutionary discovery

The boundaries of the soul and of the world