“We won’t see the particles but I’m excited, I want to see how they study them.” It was Nina Lu, my twelve-year-old daughter, who convinced me to come to CERN, in Geneva, and not that there was any need to convince me, both of us passionate about science, more than anything else, she convinced me to travel, because I even hate leaving the house for several years , I was put under house arrest (I didn’t even notice the lockdown, just as I wouldn’t notice if they put me under house arrest). So, together with my partner Maria Sole, we took a flight to Geneva and went to CERN (among other things: free entry, and free public transport for tourists, even if if you have a coffee it costs 6 euros, but the Swiss are rich).
Wonderful place fundamental for all modern physics, obviously in the 27 km tunnel that goes around Geneva, one hundred meters underground, LHC, you can’t go, but at CERN you see everything and spend a day there, it’s science but it seems like science fiction, like being inside Star Trek, inside a gigantic Enterprise.
It’s like a permanent and gigantic exhibition in the place where the infinitely small is studied, and you wander for hours among educational installations, experiments, lessons, accelerator pieces, to understand how we managed to collide protons, electrons, muons, leptons, to find new particles such as the Higgs boson (theorized by Peter Higgs fifty years ago, thank goodness he managed to get the Nobel), the field that gives mass to every particle, and understand the origin of universe, before there were even particles and atoms, in short the Big Bang.
The restaurant is also called Big Bang Café, a sort of space Mac Donald’s, except that when you are there you now see particles everywhere, you feel crossed by billions of neutrinos arriving from space every second, and you think that every atom that makes up the molecules of that we are made of is billions of years old, and they are always the same, that’s why we are stardust. Astrophysicists are enthusiastic about this, I always think that we did not have a good beginning, and we will not have a good end, as on the other hand in our individual lives, but much is known: for both writers and scientists they are a “nihilist” (but at least the scientists agree with my reasons). I think of Leopardi’s infinity, he understood that “everything is nothing, solid nothingness”, and the universe is gigantic but not really finite, we are the ones who are finite before we even begin, because what are our lives in this matter that has been expanding tens of billions of light years for fourteen billion years. I send CERN stories to my best friends Zyo and Shelly (but she doesn’t like it, inorganic chemist who works in Edinburgh but daughter of two astrophysicists is allergic to everything that goes under the atom, they made her a head like the International Space Station since I was little). I don’t publish stories on Instagram because I always make fun of my other best friend, the brilliant director of Radio Rock Emilio Pappagallo: when he travels he publishes the same stories on Instagram that Elisabetta Canalis or Cristina Marino would publish, despite the fact that he is so intelligent that he can afford to do it. But now on principle I can’t post anything, he would say to me: do you see that you do it too?
Speaking of molecules, the deal with my daughter (and Sole) was this: I say to Lu ok let’s go to CERN (even if, in fact, it is the daughter who brought the father there), in exchange the next day we go to Montreux, to visit the last place of Freddie Mercury, the one who one of the greatest Italian writers now posthumously alive (me) defined as “the only divinity not invented by man”, to look for his molecules. “How do you find Freddie’s molecules?” asks Lu. «He recorded his last songs there, there must be something left around». «In the meantime, you could also have Freddie’s atoms on you, like those of a T-Rex or Hitler» she specifies. “I told you this.” «Ok, but it’s true, so what are you looking for here?». “Will you let me think?”
From Geneva to Montreux we can get there in fifty minutes by train, the stations in Switzerland are of a Swiss order, you don’t see a gypsy, a pickpocket, everything very Swiss (my daughter «of course, we are in Switzerland»), and it’s a gray day , just the way I wanted it. «It’s a shame there’s no sun» says Sole (what can Maria Sole say?), «No, it’s better this way, I want to feel the melancholy, the yearning». Already there I see Lake Geneva with different eyes, with the eyes of Freddie who recorded his last songs, without music, «you will finish them later» he said to the other members of Queen, in fact the album will be released four years after his death with the title Made in Even.
I honestly don’t care about the famous bronze statue of Freddie overlooking the lake, apart from the fact that I hate memorial statues, but it was made when Freddie was no longer there, and if he ever saw it, why should I ever see it? I.
Instead, I experience the yearning, the spleen, in the recording room reconstructed inside the casino, where you can stand on a gold plate that indicates the point where Freddie recorded. You can remove the musical tracks with the mixer and leave only the voice, just as he recorded it, and shivers run down my spine when I hear Mother Love, an unfinished song, when he says that people believe that he wants no mercy, a place to hide , asking his mother to take him back inside: «Out in the city, in the cold world outside, I don’t want pity, just a safe place to hide Mama please, let me back inside» (listen to it here) until the verse that tells you I said, then when Brian May starts singing stop).
Great desire to steal the relics, there will be some Mercurian DNA there, if they catch me what on earth can they do to me? A night at the police station? And if they don’t catch me, I’ll take the DNA home. Sun and Lu, almost in unison: “Go ahead, we’ll leave you here.” Thanks huh. So no molecules, although as our greatest neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara explains it is only essentialism, another form of human illusion, even if I answer him with Leopardi, that since everything real is nothingness there is nothing real or anything else of substance in the world than illusions. He agrees with Leopardi, if I say so, no.
Yes, illusions. And love, the only thing that matters, love for the people you love, and in any case here too, quoting Freddie, «who wants to live forever when love must die?». When we leave Montreux I stocked up on t-shirts and figurines to add to my childish fifty-year-old wardrobe (I have written fundamental works, I have earned the right to be childish, otherwise I would always be serious like Saviano) and my collection, Lu thinks of the Big Bang , Sun looks at the lake out the window.
I put on the AirPods and my Mercurian playlist, and I look at my daughter and think about how much I love her and the more you love the more love devastates you in this senseless universe, because too much love will kill you, too much love will kill you, because I don’t wanna die, I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all, because nothing really matters, to me.