Fabiola Gianotti followed a canonical study path, and the strength of her being led her to the position she now owns, without needing to prove anything to the world that she ended up revolutionizing. She is a quiet and, yet, extremely impactful legend: one who built herself the path for becoming a hero.
To be dreamful is to look at the world around oneself and envision a life that is subjectively better and, perhaps, objectively admirable. The moment a glimpse of magic starts to corroborate one’s otherwise straightforward path, that sudden twist turns into revolutionary experience. When the magic of one’s intuitions finds the power to evolve and become shared knowledge, their author is no longer ‘someone’, but rather ‘the one’. That is, in my vision, the thrill of being a legend. To forge a personality that is nurtured through curiosity, fearlessness, and the courage to bring about meaningful change by truly believing in ideas that were born as strictly personal and paved their way for being shared by many. Following this vision, one might think of super -heroes and -heroines as outwardly creatures, who could never follow a traditional path and prove, rather, capable of the humanly incapable. However, here comes the most fundamental twist, that is, one isn’t born a hero or heroine, but can become one contingent on a strikingly controllable variable: their own mind. It is the mind that drives our thoughts, steers us to a direction rather than another, and makes us more decisively active or quietly reluctant. It is our soul, visible to no-one and understandable by our exclusive selves, who teaches us who we are, and provides us with the ingredients to become who we really are meant to be.
Destiny for heroes may, thus, be a myth more than a dogma: it takes time to build up a recipe starting from those quite roughly provided ingredients which may at first not look too great next to each other. The one individual who brings me to these reflections is Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti. A true legend worth being inspired by. A mind whose brilliance wasn’t crafted by the supernatural and whose legendary-ness wasn’t pre-scripted; one that, after reaching success, looks like it had been ‘meant to be’ from the very beginning. Gianotti is known for being the first female director of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), position she’s held from 2016 to 2025. She was responsible for leading one of two crucial experiments culminating in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, that explains how particles get mass; more broadly, she gained a renowned position within the physics realm, offering an indirect testimony of science being an a-gendered realm. As being one of the primary physicists in the world stage, Fabiola speaks with her actions and, through them, conveys an even more impactful message, touching the abstract besides the concrete that science always requires. In an interview delivered to the New York Times in 2018, she describes science as a field that has ‘no passport, no gender, no race, no culture, no political party’, words that, in my own advice, are the true key to her prominence, and reveal the mindfulness that lies beneath her achievements and flows throughout her whole being, fuelling her creativity as applied to science.
Fabiola, as shown by her pre-college studies, seemingly never pursued the scientific path, nor did her passions ever showcase a stark interest towards physics specifically. She was fascinated by the obsolete magnificence of ancient Greek, got captivated by the everlasting truth carried by the philosophers of the past, and dived into the meaning behind the making of art throughout time. She even graduated from Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi as a pianist and pondered becoming a professional dancer. What could be pictured as her ‘side’ interests are, however, quite relevant indicators of her decision to become so tied to physics and its challenges. The interrogatives that music, despite its harmonious structure, left within her inner self left a void that was filled by working on the deeper roots of what everything is made of. The almost intangible nature of the artistic message and the genius of the philosophical thoughts all seemed to lie in the inconsistency of air, which lets us breathe but is never grasped in full. Physics was, on the other hand, interested in making the invisible less concealed, in shedding light into the darkness of the not-yet-known. To understand what we are made of was the foundational block upon which to build a world that is enchanted by music, moved by art, and governed by philosophy. It was music what provided Fabiola with a great incentive to make arts and science a continuum, different but similar in rigour, fascination, and impactful outcome. She herself comments, ‘Music is with me everyday’.
As she told to the New York Times, Fabiola was dragged into conducting scientific research after reading the biography of Marie Curie, who ‘prepared the soup for dinner at the same time she was changing the radioactive sample in the next room’. Perhaps, Fabiola saw in Marie Curie that same dedicated truth who guides the ones who silently, and yet incredibly, change the world for the better. It was her courage, strength of being, and determination which made her the very much acclaimed heroine she is today, and has been for many years. Fabiola dreamt to be the one, and placed and incredible effort to making it to that goal, of the kind that looks superhuman but is, really, the result of a dedication that is easy to be talked about and much more challenging to be embraced as a daily mantra. Really, her effort shows in the betterment she placed upon the world at large, as quietly as outstandingly; perhaps, her goal was never to be legendary to the eyes of the many, but rather gratified in front of her most authentic self. Her canonical study path ended up landing a once unpredictable position which is the fruit of a hard-working ethic, paired up with the acknowledgment of her worth as a being who is capable, and can transmute her spiritual awareness into the concreteness of revolutionary scientific discovery.
In this sense, I believe Fabiola Gianotti is a legend: to be admired not because she asked to; to be praised not because she advertized her efforts; to be written about not because she had always known to be capable of the extraordinary. Rather, Fabiola’s legendary-ness, as I have come to envision it, lies in the trust she’s been putting in her thirst for knowledge, evolving in the altruistic gesture to work through it and delivering as final product a science-changing world contribution. Fabiola made her praising unavoidable, as a collateral effect of her interest in being ‘the one’, not for the others but for her own self. I believe the major teaching that I can derive from her journey is to stop feeding the fear of the impossible. Once the individual trusts in the very first steps they take, the rest comes with time; that hardly fails to make one’s determination go unnoticed. Joel Butler, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, says about her ‘She’s a warrior, for so many good things. We live in a world in which truth is not always valued. And she stands for truth’. To such recognition, Fabiola replies as a legend who, indeed, is guided by the truth she constructed for herself and through her herself. She goes ‘If my position of responsibility can help inspire young women to pursue careers in science, then I am happy to be a role model.’
