Armed with the most advanced mathematics and a good dose of imagination, a generation of theoretical physicists conceived the idea that the universe … - Gian Francesco Giudice
" "Armed with the most advanced mathematics and a good dose of imagination, a generation of theoretical physicists conceived the idea that the universe must have undergone a transformation, after a tenth of a billionth of a second from the Big Bang. At that instant, the entire structure of space-time crystallized into a new form, following a phase transition, just as water turns into ice below zero degrees. [...] The same physicists also realized that this idea so suggestive as to sound like science fiction implied the existence of a new particle, a granule of the substance that permeates all of space-time. Data presented yesterday at Cern show that that particle-the Higgs boson - really exists, corroborating the fantastic story of the cosmic phase transition.
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About Gian Francesco Giudice
Gian Francesco Giudice (born 1961) is an Italian theoretical physicist working at CERN in particle physics and cosmology.
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Gian Giudice
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Additional quotes by Gian Francesco Giudice
La scoperta del bosone di Higgs è stato un risultato fantastico, ma non sufficiente per rispondere a tutti gli interrogativi della fisica delle particelle. È stato un po' come entrare in un ristorante a tre stelle e vedersi servire una minestrina. Noi fisici teorici attendiamo fiduciosi una seconda portata più stuzzicante.
Gian Francesco Giudice: The Big Bang understood as the event that created the hot, dense gas of cosmic matter was not an explosion starting from a point in space. If it had been, we could detect traces of that initial point today. Instead, astronomical observations teach us that the primordial matter gas was incredibly uniform and homogeneous. This indicates that the universe in its infancy was like a giant pot of well-mixed soup. The Big Bang is the event in which this soup was created, not at any special point, but homogeneously everywhere in the pot. It is a uniform transition that involved a very large, perhaps even infinite, region of space that was suddenly filled with matter. Understanding the Big Bang means understanding what caused this transition.
Journalist: And before the Big Bang, what was there?
Gian Francesco Giudice: Today it is thought that before the Big Bang there was only empty space. A very special empty space, however. There was no matter, but the fabric of space was imbued with a form of energy called precisely vacuum energy capable of exerting repulsive gravity. The effect is quite amazing because it is the exact opposite of the force of gravity we are used to, which can only attract material bodies.
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