Just over five years ago, Samer, an electrical engineer, became a HiLumier. Since then, he enjoys the delicate mix of human interaction and technical work at CERN.

He is part of a team made up of people with very diverse backgrounds, something that has helped him grow personally and professionally, and that also keeps him assembled to beauty. The beauty of people working together and achieving something bigger than themselves. The beauty of union.

The challenging technical tasks that Samer carries out on a daily basis often lead him to reopen his university books and notes. And returning to those university years means going back to Toulouse, to its pinkish terracotta bricks, its warm climate, and the taste of a chocolatine.

When Samer was 20 years old, he moved to La Ville Rose to study electrical engineering. After his master’s degree at ENSEEIHT, he did his PhD on “Electric Machine Design and Control” with Renault and right after that, he joined CERN, which was a dream come true.

Samer’s childhood dream was to work on a project that would push the boundaries of human knowledge, even of human capabilities. Now he feels he is part of it. On the list of half-fulfilled dreams is to get more and more involved in environmental projects. He wants to actively contribute to a better future.

“To understand the heart and mind of a person”, wrote the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran, better known in his homeland as Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān, “look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to”.

Samer was born and raised in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, where beauty and chaos combine on the shores of the Mediterranean. Although the city faded a little last August, it did not suffocate from Samer’s memories, which still revive its colourful streets and, as it is said in French, its joie de vivre and insouciance. “We enjoy the day, we never think about tomorrow”, says Samer.

But if tomorrow, “today’s dream” for Khalil Gibran, is to be imagined, Samer does so with optimism. He hopes that in about 10 years we will be living in a more sustainable and harmonious society. And, by then, he also hopes to have witnessed the High Luminosity LHC in operation.

Whatever happens, Samer has already contributed, and continues to contribute, to this large project, and to this today. Besides, and this was not said by Khalil Gibran, “Hilumier once, Hilumier forever”.

Although sometimes it seems to us that everything has already been invented, this world still needs great inventors. Above all, women inventors who wish to improve our present. This is the dream of Heeral, a mechanical engineer who started working at CERN eight months ago.

“I want to be an inventor and  create better solutions for the world of tomorrow. We have damaged the planet to some extent and I want to have some effect on my surroundings”, she confesses. Because being an inventor in these times is like protesting, and Heeral is a tireless fighter.

She was born in Kanpur, a small city in the north of India, but has lived all her life in Mumbai, the big city of dreams. There, she did her degree in mechanical engineering, her first major achievement. “I had to go through a lot of opposition and resistance to pursue this engineering career”.

Heeral had always dreamed of being in the space industry, a path with many more thorns than roses. Society, its prejudices, old mentalities… All against the tide, but Heeral did not give up and she rebelled in her own way.

Very stealthily, without telling anyone, she began to apply for space engineering courses in Europe. She enrolled in the master’s degree in space science and technology in Kiruna (Sweden), where she did the first year. The second one was in Toulouse (France), on an Erasmus scholarship.

And the master’s thesis? She finished it last October at CERN, where she enjoys learning every day and being part of a work culture based on the willingness to help others. “Whenever I am stuck with something and I go to anyone in my vicinity and ask them about it, they take all the time they need to explain it to me in depth”, she says.

Now, for the first time in her life, Heeral has found the time to focus more on herself, and what she wants to do with her career. “All this time, I have just been going with the race, very rebellious and fighting with everybody to be where I am”.

Also now, from a distance, Heeral sees Mumbai as a philosophical entity. “After I left, I realized that the city can teach you a lot. No matter what country you go to and what cities you travel to, what I miss most about Mumbai is the activity and the energy”.

Let us remember that the current Mumbai metropolitan area is over 20 million people. “So you see life from a very different perspective. There, everyone is running to get to work on time, everyone is trying to make a living, everybody is going through the same struggle at the end of the day”, says Heeral.

Living as one in a country like India, with so many segregations in each and every sector of society, it is very difficult. In such a competitive environment, Heeral never had time to think much about her personal contributions to the world. Now, out of there and living her own dream, it is time.

The legendary Interstellar soundtrack is a good background music as you run for the bus, climb mountains or to send your morale through the roof. Perhaps also for moments of creativity, which for Heeral are synonymous with beauty.

The beauty with which this mechanical engineer sees everything. Even what is not yet in front of us. “The future for me is that I will invent some technologies in any field, which will help us to make a better life for tomorrow”, says Heeral.

And she will because she is unstoppable.

 

When Rama, a radiofrequency physicist working at CERN’s Beams Department, presses the rewind button, arrives in a childhood dream. “When I was a kid, I had this great dream of doing physics. I was determined to travel abroad to do it, something that for others was not well seen. I cannot justify now if travelling so far was really necessary, but it gave me the motivation to achieve my goal. And I did it”.

Rama was born and grew up in India, where he misses his family and good food, but not in large quantities. “My memory of India is very little now, just a vague memory, so I cannot say I miss much”. When he was 18, he left the country for his higher education. The destination? USA

He went specifically there to work in the domain of physics and experimental physics. He did his degree at Truman State University in the state of Missouri, where T. S. Eliot, one of the great poets of the 20th century, was born. To complete his doctoral studies, Rama moved to Stony Brook University in New York, where he finished them jointly with Brookhaven National Lab.

His American period embraces the steps he took from adolescence to adulthood, which shaped much of his thinking, behavior and way to approach things. Again, he does not miss anything specific. Perhaps, from time to time, the greasy and delicious food. Perhaps also, their lifestyle, slightly different from the European one.

The reason he does not miss anything concrete is that he enjoyed what he was in the US. And now he enjoys where he is. “I am at CERN because I like to do physics. I am delighted to do research within this large multicultural and interdisciplinary community in which each person plays a very small role, working towards a common goal”, explains Rama.

In 2006, he completed his PhD at CERN. At that time, there was a program called LARP, thanks to which Rama came here. And, a couple of years later, he became a CERNie in the RF Group to develop “crab” cavities, which were a vital part of Rama’s postdoctoral studies, for the HL-LHC project.

Rama is an example of determination. He considers himself lucky because he believes that opportunities have helped him to achieve his goals. “You cannot achieve everything by yourself. Opportunities have to be presented. Then, you have to be close to them to grab them”, ensures Rama.

He remembers when he got his degree. “I was extremely happy. I was happier to get my bachelor’s degree than maybe when I got my PhD, just because it was an achievement from my high school when I left India to go to another country alone. That accomplishment felt good because it was my childhood dream”.

That is why, if he had to dream big, he would love to see how, in the next 10 or 15 years, he can give back to young students who now dream of their futures, what was given to him as a child.

Rama, an example of courage, perseverance and success, will always be present in T. S. Eliot’ verses because “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go”.

 

Einstein said that theory is sooner or later killed by experience. That experience with which Antonio, the current Deputy Workpackage Leader for Cryogenics for the HL-LHC project and the Head of the Engineering and Mechanical Support Section, would like to contribute to the advancement of knowledge or the well-being of people.

“To feel that with the work I do every day I can contribute to something a little bigger is certainly to fulfil a dream”, says Antonio, who was born in Geneva, a city that harmoniously combines local life with openness to the world. A city of diversity in terms of nationalities, budgets and landscapes. A city that is not far from CERN, where he has been working since 1997.

Antonio continues to admire the creativity with which they solve problems at CERN, whose main objective is to serve. “We are a research centre where our main goal is clearly to create all the conditions and tools to improve fundamental knowledge, something that is not very common”. He also loves how beautiful it is to find those solutions together with others. Working as a team.

For him, beauty is in every crumb of life. It is also in the incredible things they create at CERN, things that are the product of the ingenuity, competence and hard work of many people. “I find them really beautiful, not just aesthetically, but as pieces of art because of the effort, the passion and the history behind them”, confesses Antonio.

He enjoys witnessing how ideas grow and how, when shared, they become common projects. “It is absolutely great to see this happen. It is, along with the technical challenges and the human aspect, a unique feature of CERN”, a place that also stands out for its culture of excellence.

As Ernest Hemingway, one of Antonio’s favourite writers, said: “everything, good or bad, leaves a gap when it is interrupted”, but the emptiness for something good “can only be filled by discovering something better”. Antonio, who considers himself a human being who has always been deeply interested in the study of nature, will continue to try to fill those gaps from CERN.

Because as this American journalist and novelist also wrote, “now is not the time to think about what you do not have”. It is time to think about what you can do with that, and Antonio, with all his experience and enthusiasm, will not stop dreaming of how to contribute to the well-being and development of our society.

May 68 is an important date in the calendar of History. Seven weeks of civil unrest occurred throughout France. Also in the northwest of the country, in Normandie, one of the favorite places of impressionist painters such as Monet or Renoir, was filled at that time with demonstrations and strikes.

Both references have in common the birth of Vicent, a researcher who has been working at CERN for 27 years. In the Technology Department (TE), in the same group, and almost in the same corridor that, as he says, has many spider webs.

But they are made up of common experiences and teachings. “I like to learn from people and share knowledge with others. The fact that I can learn new and interesting things is what makes me wake up every day”, confesses Vincent.

He has a PhD in applied physics. His thesis was about photodesorption in the cryogenic environment, which at the time was linked to the study and design of the LHC. He got it at CERN together with the Université Paris Diderot, the French philosopher best known for being one of the authors of the Encyclopédie.

In Vincent’s encyclopédie the word beauty appears next to the quarks. Also to sunsets, like the ones he used to see on the Normandy horizon. And to see a painting, listen to music, eat deliciously or share something with others. “Beauty is all that gives us pleasure. It is a subjective and very vast concept”. That is why Vicent prefers to tackle it on the physics side.

As a veteran CERNie, he has had the great pleasure of being present at the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which was somehow a dream come true. “To participate on a nano-scale to that endeavor was indeed an immense joy”, he says.

Then, what is left for the next dreams? The discovery of new particles, for example, the supersymmetric particles. Just because, for Vincent, it is a great pleasure to achieve a goal that has been shared with colleagues and in which you have invested a lot of time and effort.

And since what gives us pleasure is also beautiful, who does not want to live surrounded by beauty? Vincent cannot complain about anything. And he does not. He is very happy to be where he is and to do what he does. And, above all, with what he learns every day in his spiderweb-filled corridor.

Because in Vincent’s case, as Diderot said, “work has, among other advantages, that of shortening days and prolonging life”.

He was in Paris with his wife when, without knowing it, he sketched out the future. It was 2007 and this was one of his first trips abroad. Dmitry, a mechanical project engineer, told his wife, “it would be nice, one day, to come to Europe to work”.

She laughed then, but less than a year later, he was offered to join CERN. “It was a sudden opportunity. Something I did not expect because I had not even applied for any jobs”, he says. But as soon as he heard about the offer, the decision was made. He said yes.

Dmitry started to work on the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), an international project still in development. But twelve years is a long time and he has gone through several positions. He is now part of the HL-LHC project, specifically, of Work Package 13, which takes care of beam instrumentation.

He has two main roles. One is the engineering role, which involves all kinds of tasks related to manufacturing, design and purchasing. The second one is project coordination, where he is in charge of the communication because, as he explains, 90% of the project management is communication. And here comes his favourite part.

Dmitry enjoys that interaction, those pleasant collisions, with the CERNies around him. “I start my morning not by checking my emails, but by talking to people, asking them how their weekend went, how their families are doing… This is really what gives me the motivation for the whole day ahead”, he confesses.

In addition to a very diverse community, CERN also has cutting-edge technologies. Most of them are not to be found anywhere in the world, and that is very appealing for his more engineering side.

Although he has lived in this area for many years, Dmitry, who was born and raised in the Russian capital, still misses three things: family, friends and the cultural life. “I would say that Moscow never sleeps, but it does from time to time, although it is not a deep sleep. Every time you go out on the street, you can find cultural events, even at three in the morning”.

In both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, Dmitry graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU), on the banks of the Yauza, a tributary of the Moskva, the river that runs through the city. The city where Достоевский (Dostoevsky) was born, where Чехов (Chekhov) studied medicine and where Лев  Толстой (Lev Tolstoy) wrote most of his novels.

Instead of dreams, because these sometimes border on the impossible, Dmitry has distant plans. He would love to take a trip by car with his wife and friends from ocean to ocean. Perhaps from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Perhaps in the United States, from San Francisco to New York.

“When something that I had been planning, or that I had had in mind for a long time, such as coming to live in Europe, becomes a reality, I am very happy. It makes me feel that I am doing the right thing, that I have chosen the right path”.

Dmitry also likes to feel when something has been done from the heart. “When someone has invested all their skills, passion and professionalism in doing something, it will always look beautiful”. Whether it is a building, components for an accelerator or a road trip, for which time is much needed.

“Getting together at least three weeks, because a trip like this does not deserve to last less, is a difficult task, and that is why organizing plans for the future is complicated. Even more in our current situation”.

But, as the Russian poet Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova) wrote, “the future is known to cast its shadow long before it enters”. And “hope sings safely in the distance”.

Time does not stop when you start reading this text. Even if you stop reading right now, time keeps moving forward. Time runs like a little child and as the Polish composer and virtuoso pianist,  Fryderyk Chopin, said “time is the best way to check who is the wisest and most patient instructor”, since it “knows everything and shows all the cards”.

Time is also one of Greg’s great interests. This electronics engineer, who has been working at CERN for 8 years, has always been fascinated by time synchronization. Also by computers, electronics, and music, and its common materiality: keyboards. Greg has been programming since he was about 13 and playing piano since he was around 10. Now, he is happily merging these two passions at CERN.

He was born in Siedlce, where he misses the fresh fruits and vegetables he used to pick up from his parents’ garden. The city is located about one hundred kilometres east of the Polish capital, where Greg studied electronics and computer engineering, except for half a year, which he spent at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), learning in a different environment and experiencing another culture.

At the Warsaw University of Technology his friends made jokes, nice ones, about him because he was like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, always glued to a clock. And this is partly because Greg, for his master’s thesis, was working on the White Rabbit Project, which is the most accurate network time synchronization in the world.

In 2012, right after graduating, Greg became a CERNie. He works in the beam controls hardware and timing section. And, since 2016, he has also been part of the WP18 of the Hilumi project. He loves what he called the CERN combination: having a unique set of very challenging problems to be solved and being part of a large multidisciplinary team with which to solve them.

The French poet, Paul Valéry, wrote that “the problem of our time is that the future is no longer what it used to be”. That future that Greg tries to see in small achievable steps. “At this stage, I really hope that this whole pandemic situation ends sooner rather than later and that we will be able to travel again and discover the world around us that I love”, he confesses.

He is really looking forward to new advances in science, to understand things that we do not understand yet. He also hopes more and more people will become aware of the climate crisis and that we will succeed in finding a solution. In taking care of our planet, where there are nice melodies, and therefore beauty, which, for Greg, has a direct association with music. Also with poetry.

One of the verses of Wisława Szymborska, the Polish poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, says that “every beginning is only a continuation”. Greg fully agrees with this because in our lives, we have many new chapters, many beginnings, and in each of them, we benefit from the experience of our previous chapters. From what, in a way, we have already written. “So I would say that our time is enriched by past experiences, and each new chapter is the continuation of our global journey”.

A journey with no end that sounds like the song of the American progressive metal band, Dream Theater. The dance of eternity.

Being a physicist in the 21st century is not bad at all. Especially if you work at CERN. This is the case with Chiara, who became a CERNie 15 years ago.

She is delighted with the place and time she is in, but, if it were possible, she would be interested in spending some time in the past when everything was still undiscovered. Also because at that time a physicist was involved in a whole experiment, learning from A to Z about a project, not just being a small part of it, and working glued to a computer.

Chiara, who was born in Biella, a small village in northern Italy, studied physics at the Università degli Studi di Milano. After her master’s thesis on applied superconductivity, she landed at CERN to do her PhD, which completely changed her career path: from superconductivity to accelerator physics.

Her first five years as a CERNie were in the collimation team. Then she moved to the accelerator beam transfer group, where she is still now. She is also responsible for WP14 of the HL-LHC project, but project management is not her favorite piece of work.

What Chiara really likes is the study part, the supervision and the collaboration. She enjoys working with the different engineers and other physicists. “Essentially, I like what I can learn from, and I do it in exchanges with my colleagues and also with my students”.

For Chiara, beauty is connected to nature. “Nature in general and, especially, everything that is enormous, such as mountains, icebergs, oceans…”. And nature is linked to her dreams as she would love to be a National Geographic photographer. To spend her time in the middle of nowhere, trying to take the best picture of an animal doing something special, unexpected.

In her novel, La strada che va in città, the Italian writer and activist, Natalia Ginzburg, wrote that “memory is loving and is never casual. It is rooted in our own lives and that is why its choice is never casual, but always passionate and imperative”. Chiara agrees partially because she still has hope that we have something completely random in our lives.

“I like to think that we have a little bit of serendipity that is taking us somewhere that is not yet defined”. Because there are still many places waiting to be discovered. And many questions looking forward to having an answer.

Because, after all, it is not so bad to be a physicist these days.

It was in the Galleria degli Uffizi, just in front of the Botticelli’s Primavera that Iñigo, a full-time evolving human being and part-time industrial engineer, felt the beauty. He was looking at Flora, the goddess of flowers, at her smile, her hair and the details of her clothes, when he realized that even static things can overwhelm us.

“I think that is the feeling that beauty leaves in our bodies”, says Iñigo, who was born in Vitoria, the capital city of the Basque Country, surrounded by perretxikos and snails. At the age of 14, he had to move with his family to the other side of the Atlantic.

Santiago de Chile, the seventh most inhabited city in Latin America and the one of Neruda and Gabriela Mistral’s verses, was their home for five years. Iñigo enrolled in industrial engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, but before finishing his degree there, he returned to Spain. He graduated from the University of the Basque Country, in Bilbao, where Don Miguel spent the first years of his life.

Like him, Iñigo believes that certainties, especially ideological ones, are something to be avoided. Not only will they “make our lives bitter”, as Unamuno said, but they also bring us pain and situations of injustice. Luckily, in the scientific community, certainties are treated with a lot of care, since they are never 100% absolute. “We have percentages that determine how true an assumption is and, even more, there is a need to provide reference frames in which that particular assumption is true, so there is always a dependence”, tells Iñigo. Certainties are just one step away from faith.

Iñigo’s working life began with an internship in an aeronautical company called Aernnova. After three years working there, he was no longer an intern, and signed his first contract as an engineer. At that time, it was the “mileurista era”, and that position tasted like a great achievement. ¡Ah, la pugnaz vida a la intemperie!, as the Chilean novelist and poet, Roberto Bolaño, wrote.

Iñigo still remembers his years in Chile, which were like a dream. Also, the quality of the university and the friendships he made there with whom he is still in touch. From Vitoria, he especially misses the Iguana Klub, an alternative pub located in the old town, where every Friday night there was live music, lots of beer and good company.

In 2012 he made the jump to CERN, an organization where all information is publicly disclosed, a fact that he appreciates. “There are no secrets here”, he says, “and I also like the fact that it is not driven by money”. But above all, Iñigo, who works with equipment that has to be installed in the tunnel, loves to witness the development of that equipment, from start to finish. “It is very motivating to see something that starts as a discussion or on a piece of paper and comes to life after all”.

Iñigo considers himself a pragmatic person. He does not like to think much about the future. He prefers to live in the present, to squeeze it. For him, all this is a dream in itself. He is happy and comfortable with his current situation, with no expectations or big dreams around him, because dreams, as Bolaño wrote, have fists instead of fingers, “so they must be scorpions”.

“Today, I am like that, but in a couple of years, just because I might be doing something different or relating to other people, I will become a different person”, claims Iñigo. “My ideology can also change, which is what happened to Unamuno”.

Because, as the Basque thinker said, “la vida es esto, la niebla”, and one has to live in doubt, with its circumstances and, if possible, like Iñigo, with very, very few certainties around.