CERN atau Pusat Penelitian Fisika Partikel Eropa, dikabarkan telah memilih direktur baru, seorang wanita berkebangsaat Italian, Fabiola Gianotti. Dia juga adalah wanita pertama yang memimpin insitusi saintifik prestisius ini. Ia adalah peneliti CERN yang pada awal tahuan 2000an berhasil membuktikan keberadaan partikel Higgs Boson. Partikel ini secara populer lebih terkenal dengan nama "Partikel Tuhan", sebuah partikel yang diandaikan sebagai awal mula penyusun alam semesta.
Apa itu CERN? CERN adalah lembaga penelitian atom terbesar dan tercanggih di dunia, yang terletak di perbatasan antara Swiss dan Perancis. Insitusi ini memiliki alat akselerator dan detektor atom yang mutakhir, dan mungkin tercanggih di dunia. CERN menjadi salahsatu lembaga yang terkenal kepada publik umum salahsatunya karena novel Dan Brown, Angel and Demon yang membahas temuan antimateri yang dihasilkan oleh lembaga kondang ini.
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Fabiola Gianotti: woman with the key to the secrets of the universe
This year’s announcement that future documents published by Cern, the world’s greatest particle physics laboratory, would appear in Comic Sans, a much-derided typeface designed for children, was unexpected. Using a type created for comic books to unveil complex scientific discoveries seemed akin to publishing papal decrees on Post-it notes.
Yet the edict came with the imprimatur of Fabiola Gianotti, one of the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory’s most distinguished scientists. The 52-year-old physicist, it transpired, had a fondness for the jaunty script,although it is loathed by publishers, journalists and typographers. Gianotti even uses it in slides for her presentations, including one in which she revealed, in 2012, that she and her colleagues at Cern had discovered the Higgs boson.
Only the timing of Cern’s new typeface introduction calmed the purists, for Gianotti’s video clip, in which she outlines the decree, was released on April Fools’ Day. The Italian scientist, whose love of Comic Sans had become an in-joke at Cern, turns out to have an unexpected capacity for self-mockery and a neat sense of humour.
And these are qualities that could be vital for her in coming years in the wake of the news, released last week, that Gianotti is to become the next director general of Cern, one of the world’s most distinguished scientific posts. Her reign, which begins in 2016, promises to be a gruelling one. The laboratory’s scientists, working on Cern’s giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will by then be piling up vast reams of data produced by proton collisions generated inside the collider after it restarts operations, after a two-year upgrade, next year. Making sense of this avalanche of information will strain every intellectual sinew at Cern. A capacity to induce a little levity could therefore be a lifesaver.
Gianotti already has a reputation for being able to keep things calm. From 2009 to 2013, she led Atlas, one of Cern’s two main detector projects that pinpointed the Higgs, the elusive subatomic particle that gives mass to the basic building blocks of nature. In this role, she was in charge of 3,000 scientists from 177 universities and 38 countries, a simmering volcano of academic ambition that she nevertheless controlled with aplomb.
“I never saw her once lose control or raise her voice,” says fellow Atlas experimenter Benedetto Gorini. “Colleagues always knew where to find her and she responded to everything with a smile. It is amazing, given the stress she had to go through.”
Gianotti will be the 16th person to lead the European physics organisation, now generally accepted as the greatest particle physics research centre in the world. Crucially, she will be the first woman to be its director general. From this perspective, her elevation might seem all the more remarkable given the odds that were stacked against her. In Europe’s scientific community, for every woman at work, there are two men. In the Atlas team, only 20% of scientists were female.
And the latter were often badly treated, states another of Gianotti’s Italian colleagues at Cern. “Particle physics is a very hard environment,” he says. “If a man makes a mistake, it is just a mistake. If a woman makes a mistake, they get massacred.”
Gianotti remains phlegmatic about these trends, however, and denies she has suffered discrimination. As she points out, she was democratically elected to her position at Atlas. Nor does she believe there is intellectual discrimination against women in science, though this does not mean conditions for female scientists are perfect. Not enough support is provided for them when they are having children, she argues. As a result, women do get marginalised. (Gianotti has no children of her own, a condition that she says she regrets. “On the other hand, regrets do not get you anywhere,” she adds.)
Born in 1962, Gianotti is the daughter of a geologist from Piedmont and a Sicilian mother who was passionate about music and art. Her home life, she recalls, was lively and stimulating while her brother Claudio remembers her unusual powers of concentration. She never left anything half done, he says.
She developed a passion for cooking that remains with her today, while at school she devoured Greek, Latin and philosophy. She also took up classical dance with the aim, she once decided, of becoming a ballerina – though not any old ballerina. She had to be a star of the Bolshoi Ballet. Music remains a fundamental influence and taught her a rigorous approach to life.
Gianotti initially decided to study philosophy at university because it asked big questions, but in the end changed to physics because it was more likely to produce answers. This combination of artistic and scientific influences has left her with three passions in life: music, cooking and physics. “All three follow very precise rules,” she says. “Musical harmony is based on physical principles while in cooking, ingredients must be weighed out with precision. At the same time, you have to be able to invent because if one follows the same recipe all the time, you never create anything new.”
After studying experimental particle physics at Milan University, she joined Cern in 1994 and later began work at the Atlas experiment, a vast underground cathedral of detectors that studies the explosive debris thrown out when beams of protons, travelling at near light speeds, are made to collide inside the Large Hadron Collider. It was this work that, 20 years later, saw Gianotti stand beside Edinburgh academic Peter Higgs to announce to the world’s press that the particle he had predicted 50 years earlier had at last been found. It remains a triumph for European science, Cern and our understanding of the cosmos.
What comes next is very different matter. The Higgs boson explains how all other fundamental particles get their mass and it is the last piece in physicists’ standard model, a mathematical theory that explains the relationships of the known particles to each other. However, many major questions remain unanswered. For example, what is the mysterious dark matter whose gravity appears to hold galaxies together but whose constituent parts remain a total puzzle? Many hope the Large Hadron Collider, which was perfectly designed to find the Higgs, will also provide answers to these questions, but there is no guarantee that it will.
It may take years of generating collisions and studying the results before anything unusual or exciting emerges from the detectors. Maintaining morale at Cern under these circumstances will not be easy. Worse, if nothing important emerges at all, it will be difficult to see what future there is for machines such as the LHC.
All this suggests it not going be plain sailing for Gianotti. Few doubt that she is capable of rising to the challenges, however. She is a natural leader: slim and elegantly dressed, with a grace that reveals her past as a ballerina and who exudes a dignified self-confidence and an intensity of involvement for her work at Cern. An indication of her commitment is provided by her preparations, in December 2011, for Cern’s annual seminar at which she was set to reveal that her team was getting very close to bagging the Higgs boson. A couple of days beforehand, she got toothache. So she started taking painkillers, with little effect, until the night before the seminar, when she had to be rushed to hospital with a raging fever for emergency dental surgery. After the operation, she was told she had to remain at home. “I said I can stay at home for 20 minutes,” she recalls. There she took a shower and got to Cern for the seminar.
Raised a Catholic, Gianotti refuses to admit to any religious beliefs. Her only comment on the relationship between science and the church is to insist that physics can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. From this perspective, it is unclear how she reacts to her nickname, the Mother Teresa of Cern.
As to the value of the work carried out at Cern, Gianotti, who was runner-up as Time magazine’s person for 2012 to Barack Obama, is in no doubt. The great particle physics laboratory may spew out all sorts of practical technological advances – the world wide web is only one of them – but it is the generation of pure science that is its real accomplishment. Knowledge is like art, she says. They are the highest expressions of the human mind and Cern is the perfect place to pursue them.
THE GIANOTTI FILE
Born Fabiola Gianotti, Milan, 1962. Excelled at Latin and music at school but chose to study physics at Milan University and later received a PhD in experimental particle physics. She then became a research physicist at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. In 2009, she took over leadership of Cern’s giant Atlas experiment and its 3,000 scientific staff.
Best of times On July 4, 2012, at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, Gianotti announced to the world that her team at Cern had discovered the Higgs boson.
Worst of times Having emergency dental surgery in 2011 only a few hours before having to announce at Cern that her team was closing in on the Higgs boson.
What she says “Cern is a concrete example of worldwide, international co-operation — and a concrete example of peace. The place which makes, in my opinion, better scientists but also better people.”
What they say “Congratulations to Fabiola — and also congratulations to Cern, because I think Cern will be in very good hands.” Rolf-Dieter Heuer, current head of Cern. Gianotti will take over from Heuer as director general on the organisation on 1 January 2016.
Sumber : http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/nov/09/fabiola-gianotti-new-director-general-cern
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