Good evening
I am an astrophysical researcher, basically, I study the universe.
It’s a beautiful job as it gives me the opportunity
to look at pieces of sky…
It’s fantastic…
This image looks like a painting, like clouds in the sky before a storm…
it is actually a region of the sky various light years old
it’s made of gases and dust and it’s where stars are created.
It’s the Horsehead Nebula.
This is another nebula, a lot smaller
in the middle there’s a star which is about to die
but it’s dying very slowly.
First, it has to get rid of the matter surrounding it
and over the years it will leave a bare nucleus.
This is the death of another star, in this case it has already happened
with an explosion… look at the perfection of this image
it looks like a giant bubble of soap
moving and expanding in space at the speed of five thousand km/s.
To be an astrophysical researcher is not only to look at beautiful images
it’s also about studying a weak signal
which has traveled very long from far away.
This image represents the case of the cosmic background radiation
a radiation which is here now, and will always exist in the universe.
It originated more than 13 billion years ago
when matter and radiation broke their perfect equilibrium.
Since then radiation started to move quite freely
and it has reached us today as shown in the diagram…
The points represent the measurements
the radiation peak is represented by microwaves
the theoretical model connects the points precisely.
It’s the example of correspondence between theory and experimental measurement
which has been the most successful in the history of human kind
where the world of the extremely small explains exactly what happened
at the beginning of the universe.
It’s one of the most important discoveries ever made by mankind.
It is also the confirmation that the Big Bang theory is true.
To us researching simply means investigating unknown territories
and for many this also means to overcome fear.
What makes us overcome fear is curiosity…
Curiosity is not held back by anything.
Sometimes it also means making statements that can put us into trouble…
Take Galileo Galilei, for example, who after questioning the authority
and promoting the fact that it’s not the sun to move around the earth
but the earth that moves around the sun, spent the last years of his life under house arrest.
I believe that today to have courage means to recognize
one of our fundamental problems: the number 7.188.353.390
It’s not the tax you must pay on your houses.
It’s the number of inhabitants of planet earth today
and it’s not this number which is scary…
it’s the fact that we have reached this number at an amazing speed.
This is the story of demographic growth in the last 160 years.
The world population has grown tenfold.
Experts call it population explosion, it has had no slowing down
it didn’t’ even decrease during the greatest worldwide conflict
even if the second world war caused more than 50 million deaths.
If we look at the past growth has always existed even if it was a lot slower.
To understand where we started from
I will show you the situation in the last 12 thousand years.
The only time when there was a real slowdown
was in the 14th century, with the bubonic plague
which really devastated the world population and especially in Europe.
It’ s interesting to see that between the 6th and 5th century B.C.
someone wrote: “Be fruitful and multiply”
and so it was…
Within a few centuries, when Jesus of Nazareth was born
the world population had tripled.
At the beginning of the Neolithic revolution which was 12 thousand years ago
the world population was less than 5 million people
basically the population of Sicily today.
This means we have infested the planet, at the expense of many animal and plant species.
This is because we have this strong desire to live a long time, ourselves and our beloved.
But maybe we should see our life from another perspective
not living an everlasting life but living a good life and leaving a memory
a reason to be recalled for a long time.
I would like to tell you a story of great courage
of a person who found a way to be remembered
despite being a story of a person who somehow lost.
During the Athens Olympic Games in 1896
Pierre de Coubertin invented the first modern games.
This is an image the stadium…
De Coubertin is known because he said the knowledgeable sentence
“The most important thing is not winning but taking part”
Not everybody knows he also imposed the rule
“you can participate if you’re a man”, women were not admitted.
At the time a Greek woman decided to do the marathon.
This is a photograph of the race which had 17 participants.
The marathon was the most significant race.
The woman that turned up for registration was called Stamata Revithi
she was 30 years old and had two children already
the last one was one and a half years old.
She turned up for official registration,
she thought that by running this race
she could have improved her poverty condition
but unfortunately her participation was forbidden.
But what is admirable is how she demonstrated courage.
She ran the race anyway on the following day
and on the newspapers of the time there are articles about her.
She ran the 40 kilometers in five and a half hours,
and she didn’t run the last lap in the stadium
because they didn’t let her in so she ran around it.
With this story, she wanted to leave her mark.
She didn’t become rich and she didn’t win, as she desired
but she left her remembrance for mankind.
She didn’t invent eternal life, but she invented the eternal life of her soul
in our thoughts and in your thoughts.
Thank you