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.

Sometimes, history or audiovisual studies are not too far away from engineering. Federico is a case in point. This mechanical engineer has been working at CERN for ten years now, but his attention and interests go beyond the boundaries of science.

Federico studied mechanical engineering at Politecnico di Torino, about 60 kilometres from Ivrea, his hometown. As a good Italian, he misses the typical food of his region, the one that is not easy to find abroad. But fortunately, his childhood and adolescence are relatively close to CERN, where he has enjoyed his first and, so far, last work experience.

This is why, before the pandemic, he was able to go back home once, sometimes even twice, a month. Since the arrival of Covid-19 the distances have become longer, and with them, the hours of the days.

It was during the confinement that Federico delved into the magic of cinema. He began to focus on the more technical aspects, and also to appreciate the aesthetic features of the films. Some of them, like The Great Beauty (2013) or American Beauty (1999), come to his mind when the word beauty appears, and not only because of their titles, but because cinema is another form of art. He thinks that watching a good film is comparable to watching a painting or a sculpture, aesthetically speaking.

At CERN, Federico coordinates the engineering unit which is within the mechanical and materials engineering (MME) group. He also supervises young students and colleagues, being able to work with them and train them, which keeps him very motivated. It is a great reason for a non-stop improvement in terms of knowledge and skills.

But this step of his work that he likes so much was not there from the beginning. Shortly after starting at CERN, when he was working on the design of several particle accelerator components, he noticed that here he had the opportunity to learn and to work surrounded by experts in many fields. What began as a two or three year work adventure abroad ended up becoming a wonderful daily routine

If he plays with hypotheticals and desires, Federico would like to study history. Maybe in a few years, maybe when he retires. Maybe he never will. The important thing is that he is now very passionate about history and about continuing to discover the universal language of cinema, which is in Sorrentino’s words, its most beautiful component. As one of the characters in Youth (2015) said, we “have to believe in everything that has the possibility of being realised”.

In these times that fit in a verse of a poem by Amelia Roselli, where “il mondo é un dente strappato”, Federico is quite happy with where he is and with what he does. Let’s keep it that way.