GOD WAS THERE AND I GOT SO CLOSE

 

On the border between Switzerland and France there is somewhat of an independent State, sovereign and inviolable, where about eleven thousand people, without distinction of sex, race, politics and religion, work and study side by side in the name of research. This is CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), the most important research nuclear physics centre in the world.

CERN is the closest place to God on earth, the place where we try to answer the questions that are bound to the history of humanity: why do we exist? How did life originate?

God was there and I got so close is a story about the incredible technology used in this centre, how this place seems to be the gateway to the divine and to what cannot be explained about the universe and its existence, about how the complexity of science and the power of human technology is aligned with our insecurity, weakness, emotions; about the indissoluble link between nature, humanity and science; about how the disorder of events and things (what physicists call “entropy”) does not erase the human need to discover all secrets, in the hope that everything is linked in the name of an intimate “causality” and not due to an apparent randomness.

© Massimo Mastrorillo