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.

A sea wave can be perceived as a ripple that propagates between the atmosphere and the surface of the oceans. As it approaches the shore, it becomes not only something to jump over, but a phenomenon to study: a seesaw with a vertical and a longitudinal component.

A sea wave can be a beautiful thing to measure for those who, like Rogelio, a physicist working at CERN, find beauty in equations, mathematical properties and in drawings that display symmetries or uncover patterns.

Rogelio was born in Cuenca, in central Spain, but when he was a small child his family moved to the shores of the Mediterranean. It was in Valencia where many years later he would study the formation and the movements of the sea waves.

After his degree in physics, Rogelio did a PhD at CERN which, for him, was a fantasy. “CERN is the dream place for every physicist. I really wanted to be part of it since I started university”, he confesses. He has worked here ever since and, even during his first steps as a CERNie, nothing has disappointed him.

The dream goes on. Rogelio, who is the section leader of the Hadron Synchrotron Section, is now excited about Hilumi, the upgrade of the LHC in which he collaborates. “It is a pleasure to participate in this project, even with very small contributions”. He is delighted to be a CERNie, and he is already dreaming of CERN’s future plans: a 100-kilometre collider? A linear collider of up to 40 kilometres? Who knows.

Peaceful is a key feeling for Rogelio. When he was a child, his mother used to tell him many times that before doing anything he had doubts about, he should think if in one year or in 20 years, he would have some remorse and regret. Perhaps, in that situation, do not do it. Rogelio has always tried to apply this, which has led him to a certain sense of peace.

María Ibars, a 19th century writer and teacher from Valencia, whose verses rest on the seafront of Les Rotes, wrote that “el llenguatge de les ones és d’entendre universal”. Rogelio, to whom sea waves are very well defined mathematical objects, believes that this worldwide language of sea waves belongs to mathematics.

It is pleasant to think that the Mediterranean that saw him grow up is also universally understood.

The word freedom is gaining weight and interest these days. It is a very common term, but it is not a well defined concept. Many people think that freedom is just doing what you want. Roberto, a mechanical engineer who has been working at CERN for eight years, does not agree. “That is not really freedom. To have the opportunity to develop yourself, to make your own decisions and, with them, perhaps, to make mistakes, that is mostly freedom”, he states.

It was in September 2012, a few months after the Higgs Boson was observed, that Roberto became a CERNie. He is part of the Handling Engineering (HE) Group, internally known as “the people from the transport”, because they are in charge of all the equipment used to transport a wide variety of objects: from huge unconventional shaped pieces to extremely delicate detector parts.

In particular, Roberto takes care of the overhead cranes which are inside almost all CERN buildings. They are as yellow as the sunflowers that surround this large lab in the summer months. And what do these cranes have to do with physics? one might ask. Perhaps not much, but without them, the handling and transportation of essential components of the accelerators would not be possible. And without accelerators there are no experiments. No discoveries.

This is, more or less, how Roberto tried to explain to his mother why he was moving to the other side of the Mont Blanc, the one that looks so beautiful in the mornings on his way to work by bike.

For Roberto, who comes from a country with a great artistic tradition like Italy, beauty is anything that leads to astonishment. Something that really shakes your soul. Something that, when you experience it, you feel is hard to breathe. A song, a landscape, a Botticelli’s painting… We have so many examples around us that we only have to be prepared to recognize beauty.

Besides the family and friends he grew up with, Roberto misses the smell of the typical food of his region and the medieval essence that characterizes Corridonia, his hometown, located in central Italy. “Everyone is probably a little attached to the roots, to the origins”, he believes, but over the years, Roberto has become accustomed to live outside Italy.

Although it is not far from here, our current circumstances make it difficult to travel there as often as before. That may be why Roberto now dreams of taking a four or five week road trip around the United States. “Anche il parassita vive, in natura, con puro inarrestabile slancio”, says a verb from Gaia Danese. The present time has turned the plans we had to postpone into dreams.

This Italian poet also wrote that she began to suspect that “la chiave stia nel sangue freddo”. Perhaps that is what is needed now. For Roberto, being cold-blooded seems to be the best way to solve problems, at work and outside it. “Just stay calm and try not to be too impatient to react”, he explains.

It is time to take distance and let everything cool down. Everything but the dreams, the freedom and the yellow overhead cranes.

The poet and philosopher George Santayana believed that pleasure is the central aesthetic category and beauty is nothing more than “pleasure seen as the quality of a thing”. If pleasure is relative, each of us will experience it differently.

There is a group of people who live in wonder at being able to describe and predict the behaviour of Nature using mathematical equations. These people are the physicists, and Thibaut is one of them.

He has been working as an accelerator physicist at CERN since January 2001. He thinks that those who observe and measure Nature have a need to love it, as well as the beauty it contains.

Almost twenty years have passed and the best of his work is still the “social collisions”. But, in addition to the interactions with others and the teamwork spirit, designing beam instruments, which is what Thibaut has been doing since he landed here, is something else he likes very much about his work.

Thibaut was born in Bordeaux, the port city in the south west of France that Odilon Redon and Albert Marquet painted, each in their own way. He studied physics there, then did his PhD at the CEA/CESTA (Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique / Centre d’Etudes  Scientifiques et Techniques, d’Aquitaine).

What he misses most from there (besides family and old friends) is undoubtedly the ocean. He grew up next to it and enjoyed going to the beach, swimming and surfing. “When you are at sea riding waves, you appreciate what the sea gives you and also what the freedom is in this case”, he believes.

Even with freedom, as with the temperature or the autumn rains, there are also different degrees. One of them (which may be one of the highest) is freedom by the sea. Like the one he felt every day when he was young.

Thibaut considers himself very lucky. He has no big dreams, perhaps just to do things better than today and thus be a better father, a better scientist and a better human.

As the French poet, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, wrote in Les Fleurs du mal, “homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer”. Thibaut will not only appreciate his own sea, but will try to appreciate it better every day.

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.

We could ask “ondas do mar de Vigo” when was the last time they saw our friend Nuria, a welding engineer currently working at CERN.

Nuria was born in the proletarian city of Vigo, located in the Galician Rias Baixas. She grew up with maritime sounds in the background: first, with the Atlantic Ocean and then, with the Cantabrian Sea. After having studied mechanical engineering at the University of Oviedo, Nuria began working in Gijón, where she also studied welding engineering.

She became a CERNie in January 2011 She worked here for five years as a project engineer following the internal manufacturing of superconducting cavities, controlling the quality of subcontracted parts and qualifying welders. In 2016, she left CERN to move to ITER, in southern France, for a year. Later, she returned to CERN.

Since then Nuria enjoys her multi-layered work. She has a wide overview of the High Luminosity LHC Project, of which she is a part. From the pieces’ fabrication, which is her favourite, to how the welding is going. She can also follow other activities such as testing or radio frequency, besides other more normal project activities, such as planning and budgeting. It is very enriching for her to get to know the different pieces that make up the project: the many Lego blocks that Hilumi is built with.

On her return to CERN, Nuria also came back to the Alps’ foot. In the nature of this area, sometimes French, sometimes Swiss, she meets beauty. It reminds her to love because, as she believes, “we can find beauty when we love something”. That is why some will find it in a sunset, others in a baby’s smile, and others even by the sea.

Although we are living problems, as the Spanish Philosopher María Zambrano said, knowing what will happen every day would be very boring. Nuria likes that unexpected side of life. She is not a big dreamer: it is enough to enjoy the day to day, to do things that fill you up and to try to be as happy as possible in any circumstance. But maybe, if she had to dream big, she would do it with her own house in Spain in front of the beach, to be able to greet the sea in the mornings.

For now, Nuria will continue to see, in addition to the different HL-LHC project’s steps, the seasons of this peculiar area and their colours: from the white of the snow that overhangs Mont Blanc, to the orange and yellow tones of an autumn on the Jura hill.

The word polymathy refers to wisdom that encompasses knowledge about various fields of science, art or the humanities. A polymath is an individual whose knowledge spans a significant number of subjects. Michele is one of them.

The term was expressed by León Battista Alberti, an Italian Renaissance architect who died in 1472 in Rome, where 488 years later, Michele was born. His family came from northern Italy, but they moved to the capital just before Michele’s birth. That may be why he does not really feel himself as a typical Roman.

On Michele’s night table, there is a tower of books and magazines of all sorts: from astronomy to music, philosophy, bike preparation, sailing, photography and so on.

Professionally, Michele is a mechanical engineer. During his university studies, he was a technical student at CERN and he also got there a Fellowship in 1989. After that, he moved back to Italy, specifically to Frascati, to work at the INFN-LNF on the construction and operation of an accelerator called DAFNE, and where he remained for about seven years.

When he felt that for him the most interesting part of the job was completed, Michele looked for new challenges, and he joined the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Harvard University in Boston (US), where he worked for one CERN experiment proposed by an American collaboration. He did not dislike the idea of remaining in America for a while, but a few months later, he received an offer from CERN to join the LHC construction in the Magnet Group. And, since 1998, Michele is a CERNie.

More than 22 years living in Geneva, which has a good lake, but it has little to do with the sea. Michele loves sailing, but the Lemán is far from the Mediterranean in many aspects, not only in the temperature. He misses sailing to open sea. Also, his big Italian family and the atmosphere of Rome, where you can actually smell the History. The city in which beauty lives on, standing still in time.

To Michele, beauty is something that can not be defined as a general concept because it is too much dependent by personal vision, even by the historical context. He prefers to see beauty as looking at the sources, guided by the characteristics that will provoke specific strong emotional and positive feelings in people. If those feelings are there, whatever reveals them can be considered as beautiful.

Michele’s parents and grandparents used to say that “le vie dell’inferno sono lastricate di buone intenzioni” (the road to hell is paved with good intentions), closely related to this other proverb: “il diavolo è nei dettagli” (the devil is in the details), like in this journalistic profile. Every time he hears them, he suspects again that these sayings are timeless and, the vast majority of the time, right. That is why, perhaps, we should drive to a bit more humility or modest attitude when we dream big. That is Michele’s recommendation.

He wishes that, as an engineer at CERN, he could continue to have interesting jobs, like those that he has been lucky enough to experience so far: he is not someone afraid of changes. In Mémoires d’Hadrien, written by Marguerite Yourcenar in 1951, Hadrien, the emperor of Rome, aged, isolated and with a heart disease, tells to his grandson, the future emperor Marco Aurelio, that his first homelands were books. Michele’s would be his books and magazines.

This Renaissance man, this homo universalis, who dreams of having the time to fully read those magazines, which are like a lighthouse on his night table.

Who am I? Paolo hesitates. This could be the last question of a person’s life. It is still too soon for him to answer it, but he tries. He feels himself a person eager to discover and to learn. This curious 49 years-old Italian engineer is motivated by the fact of seeing (in the broad sense of the term) as many things that are possible.

In 1998, Paolo became a CERNie. During his last year of university, in Turin, he had a 4 months Erasmus experience at the Joint Universities Accelerator School (JUAS). Located in the French Geneva region, and very close to CERN, these seemed to be small clues about Paolo’s future scenarios. At that time, he did not know that he would end up living in that area and, what is more, working at the world’s largest center for scientific research.

The year after he presented his Master final project, he got a fellowship to be part of CERN. Once he got his engineer’s diploma, he got an extra year at CERN and, when the flame of that contract blew out, he had the opportunity to join CERN as staff. It was the time in which the production of the LHC components was, clearly, the CERN strong bet. That time was 1998.

But before moving out to Geneva, where he lives now with his family, and before studying Nuclear Engineering at Turin’s university, Paolo spent his early 19 years in Ivrea. Located in northern Italy, 50 kilometers from the capital city of Piedmont, it is a small town that had its splendor moment with the foundation of Olivetti, a big company which started producing mechanics typewriting machines.

Paolo’s eyes were able to see how this company practically disappeared and how employment opportunities went from a private enterprise factory to municipal utilities, such as the city hospital and the tribunal. These days, he does not miss much from Ivrea, where he can go back, as much as he wants whenever he wants. Paolo is not in the mood for nostalgia.

He is very happy in the peculiar Geneva. Paolo talks about being happy as if it was, in some way, having the feeling that you have been able to accomplish something that makes you feel full, spiritually full. That is why we can experience happiness by sitting alone on a coast of Scotland while contemplating the ocean or by solving technical problems with your work team.

His dreams are simple, but that does not mean his dreams are easy to achieve or that he is not ambitious. The dreams’ staircase of Paolo consists of lots of steps: one with the feeling of having participated in big challenges, another one with the feeling of having contributed to the knowledge of humankind. Another one hosts his personal growth and the acquaintance of new people and more ways of living, and, one of the current last ones (could be called, “the father step”), shelters his kids finding their place in a society on which they feel happy for what they are going to be.

Although, “l’erba del vicino è sempre più verde”, it is important to refocus on ourselves and, instead of complaining about something we are finding outside, trying to understand it and taking action. We should all work on improving ourselves. Paolo does it. He continues facing challenging situations at the professional level and, personally, he walks along without fear at the border of the unknown and the things we can name.

Paolo is a man with the insatiable curiosity of children and cats and the wisdom of the tribal elders. He belongs to the old school on which every day, you learn something. And he is an exemplary student!

In the centre of the capital. At the most crowded and congested spot in town, where people only know the rush and the sky is greyer. “Pongamos que hablo de Madrid”, where Mariam lived until she came to work at CERN in early January 2017.

She studied aeronautical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and she also did her Master’s degree in aerospace systems there. Shortly after, she exchanged the crowded streets of the Spanish capital for the peace of mind, the noise of the cars horns for the birds singing. The tiny nature concentrated in the Retiro and Casa de Campo for the immense lac Lemán and the gleaned Jura mountains.

Mariam is so glad with her decision that she hardly misses anything from her city of birth (well, just the people, the food and the sun). She adapted very quickly to this countryside life. Seasonal sports were very helpful: skiing, snowboarding or raquettes during the winter, and cycling, trekking or swimming in spring and summer. Outdoors activities that were unthinkable in Madrid.

Although she does not consider herself a dreamy person, Mariam is content to be as happy as possible every single day of her life, or at least, to try it. But, what makes her happy? To keep growing, personally and professionally, as well as enjoy the little things that happen around her. It does not matter if they are good or bad.

Her parents taught her that “al mal tiempo buena cara”, and it has really helped Mariam at some points in her life. In The Gods themselves, Isaac Asimov wrote that “there are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass”. Better to face them with a good attitude, or with our best smile.

Mariam loves science fiction movies and literature: the futuristic landscapes and conspiracies. Although she is not a pure scientist, she is a key part of a huge scientific project because, together with people from other disciplines, engineers at CERN make scientists’ dreams come true, and we all know that “with great power comes great responsibility”.

The needs and the priorities change over the life, and that is why Mariam will redefine her idea and feeling of happiness. Nothing new under the sun: it is not what used to make her happy either that makes her happy now. The Friends, who live in neighbours apartments above Central Perk, know a lot about this, about growing, about life.

Asimov also wrote that “to succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well”. Perhaps, that is why Mariam prefers not to make plans for the future and let herself go. She is not in the past either, not in the mood for nostalgia.

New beautiful people and life experiences will get in her path, and Mariam will always welcome them with open arms and her best smile.