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.

If people were synonymous, Javier’s would be knowledge sharing. Since 1998, he has been at CERN, where he leads the Hardware and Timing section of the Beams control room. He works in the domain of particle accelerators controls, together with people who are mainly involved in electronic design and low-level software development, most of the time, in the form of Linux Device Drivers.

Javier is from Castellón, a small city in eastern Spain surrounded on one side by the Desert de les Palmes, a mountain range almost 20km long, and on the other by the calm swaying of the Mediterranean. He does not miss it much because he goes there quite often (we are referring, of course, to the pre-pandemic period).

Returning to Castellón is synonymous with reunions with family and old friends. “I have come to appreciate some things that I did not appreciate so much before”, he says. The sea, for example, where his children discovered that their father, not very skilled in skiing, knew how to swim, dive, fish and sail. Synonymous with cool and exotic.

Javier left Castellón in 1993, when he went to Lyon (France) to do his university studies in electronics and physics. Shortly after finishing them, he landed at CERN, which is still like a gift for him. “I think we are very lucky to have extremely competent, motivated and interesting people to work with. It is always a pleasure to come in the mornings and spend time with them”, tells.

In addition to the CERNies, Javier is passionate about CERN’s mandate, which includes knowledge sharing as a key point. For him, sharing one’s knowledge is a natural and almost impulsive act. “Once we understand something, most of us want to share it, but if you are part of an institution whose mandate is in contradiction with that sharing, then you can have an internal conflict. At CERN we are very fortunate because, from its convention, we are encouraged to take some time to ensure that we share the knowledge that we generate here”.

Richard Feynman, who became one of Javier’s great heroes of physics, not only because he was a great physicist, but because he was synonymous with quite a character, once said that the more we know about something, the more beautiful it seems to us. When Javier hears the word beauty he thinks of Feynman, for whom everything we know enriches our experience and contributes to beauty.

The same beauty is hidden in the chords of the composer and guitarist Francisco Tárrega, born in Villareal, which is almost Castellón, except for the football team. Javier believes that there is something special about the sound of a guitar. “It is very difficult to describe what it feels like to listen to a well played guitar. That is what beauty is all about. It is not something you can describe in words”, although it has many synonyms in the form of pleasure and sharing, and shared pleasure.

He is a big fan of the Tárrega Festival, an international classical guitar event, which has been held in Benicassim every summer since 1967. Javier used to go there every year, and enjoyed it very much. But now, he also enjoys the guitar on another level.

With one of his kids, who is learning to program and design electronics with him, he prepares hacking sessions. Currently, both are programming the sound of a guitar string. “We are learning what it takes to make that same sound artificially, by software”, and he is enjoying it immensely because that extra knowledge is synonymous with extra pleasure and extra beauty.

Javier’s future dreams will be related to knowledge sharing. Perhaps, playing a role in creating a European or global foundation to ensure that public money is spent in a coherent way, and thus generate some kind of broad and publicly available knowledge base. Perhaps, working for it in his domain: software and electronics. Who knows?

What is known is that, even in dreams, he is synonymous with sharing knowledge. “I don’t even think this is professional. It permeates my whole life”, he confesses. As Nietzsche stated, “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”, and Javier certainly has that why.