Although he was born in Zaragoza, the childhood and adolescence passport of Rubén, an experimental physicist enthusiastic about learning and progress, embraces lots of stamps from both Atlantic’s shores. How to consider yourself belonging to a certain place if your nature of globetrotting?

Rubén was born the same year that Bruce Springsteen, a rock legend to whom his mother approached at an early age, won the Brit Award for International Solo Artist. He left the maños and the Ebro two years later to settle in the Spanish capital, but just for a couple of years. From the 4th to the 7th birthday, Rubén grew up in a paradise: San Diego, in California (USA), where he remembers taking baths on the beach every 31st of December, and the miniature train of Balboa Park. He came back to Madrid, the city that would end up becoming his usual intermittent destiny, and when he was 12 years old, Rubén’s family moved to Munich (Germany).

It was 1998 then, and, not so far from there, Ernst Jünger died. The German philosopher was invested doctor honoris causa by the Complutense University of Madrid, where Rubén, on his return to the capital, would study a degree in physics, although, emigrating in the last year to Rome (Italy) by the hand of a Erasmus scholarship. He came back to Madrid to do a master’s degree in nuclear physics and high energies and, a year later, in 2010, he gained momentum to jump again, this time to Leiden (Netherlands), where he began his professional career at the European Space Agency (ESA).

From there, a little bit like the main characters of Cien años de soledad, to whom “todas las cosas buenas que les ocurrieron en su larga vida”, derived from the change, Rubén arrived to Geneva, his most perennial destination. He has been for almost 9 years in the city of the watches and the international organizations.

Rubén works at CERN. He is part of the R2E (Radiation to Electronics), which seeks to identify and mitigate the failures caused by radiation, in the machinery of the LHC, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

For Rubén, beauty is defined by its practicality. Something is beautiful if it has objective characteristics that are useful or convenient. This experimental physicist opts for a beauty friendly to progress, willing to help us as individuals and as a society. The beautiful dwells in the Aristotelian virtue, in always going beyond.

He agrees with the Madrid poet, Dámaso Alonso, that the motor that drives the world is passion, it is placing heart in our actions. That is why, at the pace of Thunder road, Rubén dreams of continuity: the continuity of learning, of facing new challenges time and time again and, above all, the continuity of doing something that truly excites him.

Even if he was lame, Rubén would go earlier to the tavern of knowledge than to mass, because in life, as in the fictitious Macondo, “lo esencial es no perder la orientación” y Rubén knows where he wants to go.

Irene García Obrero / CERN 2020

Corinna’s backpack is full of dreams waiting to come true. The first of many? To finish writing her thesis. As soon as she defends it, she will close a chapter, a very special one.

Corinna first came to CERN in 2015 as a Technical Student. She had studied a Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where she moved when she was nineteen. After that, as she wanted to focus on nuclear technologies, she decided to study a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. Shorty after finishing it, she came back to CERN, this time as a Doctoral Student in Physics.

For five years now, Corinna has been a CERNie. Somehow, she still is. Even if she is not physically working there, her PhD is carried out in a collaboration between CERN, the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and ETH in Zurich, where Einstein and Mileva Marić also spent a chapter of their lives.

But Corinna already misses the people and, no doubt, the R1 which, every Friday, became the nerve center of CERN. It was a must-attend date, a holy place where the stress of the week was relieved by beers and good conversations (some of them with strangers, at least until then).

She fondly remembers playing volleyball there, lots of cheers! and a few farewell parties. Also, the CERN Photo Club sessions, where she learned to stop using the automatic mode. Corinna also joined the only women’s football team at CERN, Scrambled Leggs. It was not a winning team, but they enjoyed every game. Those moments will always be kept in her backpack.

In addition to growing a lot as a scientist, at CERN she became a person she did not imagine five years ago, but this did not come for free! Corinna found herself many times out of her comfort zone, facing situations that are not always as pleasant as we wish, but she did it and the feeling afterwards was very satisfying. That also makes us the person we are today.

She felt like a sponge absorbing lots of information from the people around her. Really smart people and women leaders who changed a lot her world view: unwittingly, they helped her to change and to design her own glasses with which to see reality.

Corinna is very passionate about what she does, as did Oriana Fallaci, the first female Italian war correspondent, world-renowned for her peculiar interviews. She used to say that wars were like madhouses, and those who were in them were their patients.

To Corinna, it is in the CERN’s purpose where beauty is hidden. Using science for peace, seeing how people from different cultures and religions (even from countries currently involved in armed conflicts) collaborate with the sole aim to discover what the universe is made of, and how it works. According to Fallaci’s simile, Corinna would be one of the madhouse’ psychiatrists.

People like her try to push the boundaries of the human knowledge farther and farther every day. She is sure that this is the miracle of research. In the words of Lise Meitner, the pioneering woman behind nuclear fission: “Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist”.

Corinna would love to use her knowledge and her technical skills for humanitarian purposes. She has always been interested in disarmament, specifically in nuclear disarmament. So, when she grows up, she would be happy actively working on this. That is why another one of the dreams she keeps in his backpack is to find, after her PhD, a postdoctoral project which will allow her to work on this topic.

Meanwhile? She wishes she had the time to travel around the world. Corinna, who was born in small town in the north of Italy close to the Swiss border, is a globetrotter, in whose mind there is something that has been going around for a long time: to take part in the Mongol Rally, a charity rally from Prague to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. There is no set route. Nor is there a fixed deadline. It is the magic of the adventure, with its contingencies and surprises. If 2021 allows it, this will be another dream come true for Corinna.

As Francesco Guccini sang, “un orizzonte insegue un orizzonte; a un’autostrada, un’altra seguirà”. A dream will follow a dream, one goal will chase another one. Because “gli spazi sono fatti per andare”, and Corinna will find in them her freedom. “La sua libertà”.

Irene García Obrero / CERN 2020