Educational
Frascati, March 27 – 31 , 2023
From Quarks to Black Holes: let’s get INSPYRED!
That’s life – S. Pisano (CREF, INFN-LNF)
“For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”. Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of Quantum Mechanics (QM), highlighted the disconcert that anyone should feel while approaching quantum phenomena for the first time.
From a historical perspective, QM has always been confined within the microscopic realm. It has been introduced, in the first place, to explain the atomic structure and the behaviours of the elementary particles composing it and, given its nature, the phenomena it governs are not expected to
play a role in the macroscopic word, where quantum effects should be washed out by the active thermodynamic structures characterizing everyday’s life. In particular, no QM effects are supposed to play a role in biological systems, where the warm and humid environments composing living organisms should destroy any coherent, quantum-mechanical behaviour. However, recently, a new paradigm is emerging, that suggests that, possibly, quantum mechanical phenomena may persist in biological contexts as, for example, the photosynthesis or the navigation systems of some birds.
Silvia Pisano
Silvia Pisano took a master degree and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics at “Sapienza” University in Roma. After having spent some years abroad as a postdoc (in Austria, Brazil and France), in 2011 she came back to Italy at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF). Since 2018 she is a staff researcher at the Centro Ricerche “Enrico Fermi” and she is an INFN associate at LNF. She works in the field of the fundamental interactions, devoting her activity, in particular, to the investigation of the strong force and the way it governs the structure of protons and neutrons. In the period 2008-2016 she was part of the CLAS Collaboration at Jefferson Lab (Newport News, VA, USA), while in 2017 she joined the ALICE experiment at CERN.