 OK, we can start. Good afternoon to all of you. Thank you for joining us. So we have special guests today. I think we have the honor and pleasure to have Eliezer Rabinovich here. I can claim, I think it's true, that he's probably one of the most influential theoretical physicists in the world, not only because Eliezer is one of the leaders for his research. He's in many aspects of quantum theory and string theory, and he has been having a very important career over the years with a diverse group of collaborations. But also he has been playing a key role in many aspects of physics, I would say, high energy physics in general, high energy physics in particular, but physics in general. So I can say several things about Eliezer. He has been playing a key role in putting together different communities of physicists. So I have the pleasure to know him for many years, and we are friends, and we're always meeting in many different places, and we always share different experiences. And it is hard to go to a place where something important is happening in physics when you don't see Eliezer. Yes, I remember seeing him in the 60th anniversary at CERN, and I was getting worried that I hadn't seen Eliezer yet, but then suddenly he appeared. So it was something that, you know, if Eliezer is there, everything is under control. And so also when I came here, I realized that there was an activity that had been co-organized by ICTP, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and a group of theoretical physicists to organize an activity that is happening regularly in CREIT, just to put together different communities of theoretical physicists, field theorists, and so on, from different countries, from Pakistan to Israel to Iran and so on. And there's a meeting in CREIT, which ICTP has been involved participating in the organization and funding. And I didn't know when I came here, but very early since after my arrival, Eliezer made clear, made sure that I would know about it so that we can continue supporting this activity, and we have been supporting it since the past nine years. For what concerns today, Eliezer has played a key role, one of the most important persons behind this project of CESAMI, and that's what the talk is about. I learned from him actually in a meeting in Singapore that I personally didn't know neither, and that the beginning of CESAMI came also when I discussed the ideas that came from Abdul Salam, so it's one of the things that Salam still gets credit and I didn't know. And then I learned also how much involvement and passion Eliezer dedicated to this project, which you will see today in his presentation. It is a major initiative to put together a big experimental facility in the Middle East, in Jordan in particular, and then with the participation from Iran, again, Israel, Palestine, and so on. So it's the best example of what we can call, and people usually call, scientific diplomacy. And actually because of that, and of his many contributions, I think Eliezer was recently received a special award for scientific diplomacy from the AAAES, and so we are very happy to have him here and give us a general perspective and view of what CESAMI is and the importance of CESAMI. So please join me to give a warm welcome to Eliezer Rabinovich. Thank you Fernando for such a personal introduction. And I would say in general, those of you which had the opportunity to listen to my talks in string theory, know that usually my talks are built on irrefutable logic. One lines follows from the other. There is nothing to discuss or to debate. But this talk comes from another place. It's actually, you will see, it becomes more emotional. I get carried away during the talk. And so it's different, and it's different. I'm very glad to be here, but I come here in a different mode than I usually am. Now I must emphasize that everything I'm going to describe here is very personal. This is my personal view, my perspective. There is an Arabic and in Hebrew, a proverb that says that success has many fathers and failures are often. I know the group of people which will be blamed if this finally fails, but the number of fathers can be very large and my view will be very personal. I also call it, you will see why, a visit to a parallel universe. Now, after I have talked, I would like to give in two short videos actually the opportunity for the people involved in the actual experiments to you, and so I'm a voice for them. So I'd like you to hear them. This is something I would like to leave to next generations. This is what I believe in. It has to work because it means a better world. It means a better world from many aspects in terms of bringing science here, in terms of bringing a line of communication. Maybe it will not bring peace to the region. It is very valuable, and it is very important for the region because one country cannot afford to have a single, single-tone machine. Here we are as scientists, and scientists usually belong to the humanity, not to the country. I understand that there are some political use of science, but we are not here for political use of science. We are here for science. The work we do here can be used in many fields, including electronics, including engineering, including material science. So it will have many applications from cement to health. What we hope is that science will open the door for other or further understandings concerning other issues. This is what we hope. I mean, we will deal with science, and somehow we will open the doors that are closed for years or for centuries. Iranian, and Palestinian, and Pakistani scientists are my friends because they are scientists, so we have a common ground. The common ground is doing research. We don't care about what is your religion, what is the color of your skin. We don't care about that. We only care about science. In science, there is no hostile. We are scientists. We are academic people. We are not dealing on political issues. I think sesame is a modern technology which helps two people around the Middle East to develop and improve their knowledge. I imagine a war would bring it to a stop, but we've been pretty close to a war, a very high tension level in the last few years, and somehow we managed to keep going. It was always my dream to show that Arabs and Israelis can work together for the benefit of humanity and for the benefit of their own people, both sides having an interest in that. And for me, sesame in a way is an incarnation of such a dream. Okay, so we are in a period of fake news, so this is true. These are true people. They are not boats or objects like that, and this was not a script. This was spontaneous, since they said to this interview from the BBC, and I must say that from my point of view, half the way is already done if a group of young people can say such a thing. Now, in general, I'm very happy to see here many young people because I'm really mainly speaking to them. We live, or let's say, when I grew up in Jerusalem many years ago, we were brought up that we have to contribute to our country and we have to contribute to our neighbors and we have to contribute to humanity. This was put into our education. I think when I look at the young people around me, children or grandchildren, I think they don't have exactly the same view. I think when they look at the world, they view a very over-constrained system, a system in which they believe that their own impact is negligible. They cannot do a dent, they can do nothing to change the course of events anyhow, so they concentrate mostly in helping themselves, their dear ones, their families, and maybe a little larger group around them. And I see this all over the world. I mean, you can get major things out of these major contributions, but it's more directed not as a motivation to help society at large. So for this group of people, I would like to say that you can make a small change if you are crazy enough and I will tell you the qualifications you need or minimal qualifications you need for that, but it's possible to do it. And one doesn't have to retreat to this narrow world around us. It's not necessary and the world needs a different attitude. Now, I'll show you another film. That film already describes, because I'm taking for granted that you know what I'm talking about, which isn't obvious from here. I will go into that later, but you will now see how the place looked about half a year ago and there will be more descriptions on what it is. It lasts for four minutes. Again, I do want to show it because you hear the voice of the people that actually this is for them. We're sitting here in the building around us are peaceful olive groves and you ask yourself, what's special about this place? Finally, now have in our region this wonderful machine. I mean, we are talking about one of the world's most complex machines. You can describe a synchrotron as a rather large light bulb. We produce light, which you cannot produce by other means. And the aim is that we accelerate electrons. The electrons are charged. When a charged particle is accelerated, it begins to radiate. At this point, they emit the full range of electromagnetic radiation from infrared to x-rays. The radiation has very unique properties. And because of that, we can study property of materials which you cannot study with a simple laboratory source. Anything from an isolated atom to a complex system like a human being. You are allowed to study whatever you want. You just have to design your research in a perfect way that suits the experiment and that's it. Sesame started with a large group of countries involved. Many Arabs and Israelis said together, trying to think how they could learn about each other. Using science as a tool for understanding, learning about nature, learning about the material world and trying to understand it better together. It was a 20 years course of action with many hurdles and ups and downs on the way. But we kept on pushing in order to bring Sesame to become a real center of excellence in science in the region. We can collaborate. People from all over this region can do this together. For now, we have the infrared beam line and the x-ray fluorescence beam line. We already had some results on life science like breast cancer, diagnosis. We're working on cultural heritage, archaeology, bioarchaeology. We are studying mummies. The first ever measurements that were done were on ancient individuals from this very region. We're exploring perhaps craft activity-related metal uptake in bones and teeth. I'm from Palestine from Najah National University in Nablus. I'm from Iran. I'm from Egypt. I'm from Turkey, from Ankara Middle East Technical University. It's not that common in our region that people are breaking lots of rules. And the rules are different in our region. So you have the society rules, you have the gender rules. And Sesame is an entity that is breaking all the rules, actually. For me as a woman, and for me as a young student, it allowed me to think. The best point of Sesame here in this region is that it can gather people from all nations here in this region. This is a very good point of this facility. In a way, it will make us to compete with the other researchers in the world. So we will not just rely on the bench-top spectrometers, but we will have really valuable data, which could eventually be as publication maybe in nature of science. Next steps at Sesame is to see this place full of researchers. I hope really that the soon obvious area here will be full with pipes and vacuum pumps and instruments. So I think we are heading to full operation. I wanted to grow to become an international scientific center and to do science and produce science here that is published in the most prestigious world class journals. My real dream is that the science here will be of very high quality and that people will say how this was discovered at Sesame. And as Fernando kindly mentioned, this was recognized the following people, but it got the AAAS prize. But the prize is really for Sesame, just selected as five people. OK, now what my talk will be, how will it be about? Well, I will give an introduction. I will then discuss real dreams. That is how to make dreams into something real. Then I will discuss how one laid the foundations to enable to reach the point that you see here and how the puzzle was put together. Because I'm a physicist, I want to avoid in some places to give hints on the type of physics topics that I work on. So I'd like to start this with a puzzle. I show you a photo. And I ask you to think what do you think it is. And I should at the end be able to give you the answer. And if anybody knows the answer now, please don't spoil. I don't want to hear. OK, so let's for a moment assume we are sitting in an academic institute that I'm giving the science for understanding 101. Now, I don't call it science for peace, even though it's a slogan. Because I think that in the name of just and lasting peace, so much blood was spilled that let's leave that aside. And let's not talk about the peace here. Let's start with understanding. That's a very important step forward. Now, what do you need in order to come into my course? Because each of you was checked by a future scanner which reads your minds and thoughts and know exactly what you have to do, what you think about. So you have to have an infinite amount of optimism. And I will repeat that as we go on. If you don't have an infinite amount of optimism, if you will listen to your friends which tell you that there is no chance that this would work, it wouldn't work. So you need to be, I would say, autistic in a way. You really need not to listen to a lot of feedback that you get. And try and filter the ones which give you strengths. So that's a requirement from the course. Okay, we'll come back to that. But I'm sitting at ICTP, which is an embodiment of these ideas. So nevertheless, I will repeat, why is science a good tool for understanding and why are scientists a good tool for understanding? So why science? I give you an example. I was director for seven years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem. And we had a meeting which lasted 10 months in which scholars from Christians, the Muslims did not agree to come and Jews, sat together to discuss the first five books of the Bible, of the Old Testament. And they spent there and were paid for 10 months. There were eight people. And after eight months, they viewed this as a fantastic success and they continued doing it. What was their achievement? They reached agreement on five paragraphs of the five books. So they agreed on a common interpretation of that. So, and that for them was probably something they never succeeded to do before. This is not the situation in science. When two scientists come together, they agree on Maxwell's equation. We are not going to argue the laws of how electricity flows in these walls. And this is crucial because we in modern society are filled with layers which come from the media, from our education. So when we see a person with whom we are at an adversary situation, we don't really see the person. We see all the images which we collected over the years from newspapers, from classes, from books we read. And when a scientist meets another scientist, he's immediately curious to be able to evaluate that person professionally. Does it make sense what that person says? Is it interesting? Do I learn something? Can I teach something? And I think that by doing this, one removes an enormous amount of static noise which differentiates people. Now, as you know with your colleagues, there are some colleagues that after you set with five minutes, you don't want to see that person again. And there are others which you would like to see again and again and again. But this is just the human condition. However, from the point of view of be able really to see each other, I think scientists have this ability to see each other, evaluate each other professionally, and then it may move or not also to a more personal level. But I think that is why science is an important. Scientists themselves, well, scientists in some fields are forced to collaborate by the problems that they have. Of course, there are some academics which value only sitting alone and they produce beautiful things. But in science, many of us are forced into collaborations. So the tool of having understanding of another person on a complex issue, building the necessary network to understand another person is there. And therefore, I think scientists can help in understanding and communication. And again, I have no illusion. I know that scientists range from terrible to fantastic Mother Teresa's. But that is not the issue. The issue is that we were equipped of tools of knowing how to collaborate. After saying in this course a general concept, and there will be more concepts, what are we discussing here? So we are discussing a light source like the one in Eletra here. And it was built in a way on the ideas on which CERN was built. Now CERN was built, came out in 1954. It had many goals, but one of its goals was to help heal Europe after World War II. The scientists on both sides were very busy in devising methods to kill civilians but also and soldiers on the other side. And then they had to come back together again. And it wasn't easy. We are trying to do the same thing in the Middle East. But in the Middle East, there is a great difference between that and CERN. In 1954, World War II was over for nine years. It was clear who won the war and who lost the war. So building the structures were under a situation where there were certainties on what is going on. In my region, this is not the situation. The war is going on. Who is winning or who is looting the war may change on your daily mood and may change on your narrative, your perspective. So we have to build a common ground in a situation where we really are still in a real conflict. And this is, the conflict is real. There's no doubt about it. So this is very, very challenging. And this is what we tried to do. So I hope you remember that challenge when you compare CERN with its right now rather small 27 kilometer circumference machine, small relative to 100. And the 100 meters deep, you know why it's deep, the students? Do you know why it's 100 meters and not on the ground level? Okay, that's one possibility. Another that some air force would come and bomb it. But that's not the reason. It's the first stable geological strata. So it's very crucial to have stability of the beam line. So that's why they had to go 100 meters low. In China, if it will be built, one doesn't need that. The place they've identified is stable immediately down. So that is the reason. Okay, as you know, at CERN, the megalomonic high energy physicists think they can put, they can study nature. They can put all the equation on one slide and they have some success in it. There are many places which participate in that effort. And there are many countries involved in that. That's CERN. So remember, this is now Sesame. It's, this is the building. It's 75 meters by 75 meters. Kilometer is not a scale here. And this is where the light source is. Now, I really want mainly to mention the human aspects. So I will go very fast through the science. And one reason is I know very little about it. So the whole science of light sources is something which is very active over the world. A lot of very important results were obtained at various light sources. And they make a lot of use out of the fact that when electrons go around, they radiate. Now I will mention here and mention maybe again, of course, to the Middle East, you will not bring a collider because collisions we have every day. That's not a problem. Much better to bring a light source, much more needed in our area. So here you have a list of things which I welcome you to photograph and absorb, which are very good uses for synchrotron radiation sources, just so you know where the spectrum is. The spectrum is very wide, unlike in high-energy physics, the issue is not what is the highest energy you can reach. This is not the point. There are many other parameters. There are many uses, I will describe some. So you see here that the energies involved of one photon and the wavelengths involved have a very broad region and each region has its own specific uses. So this is a general machine and then we'll reach how we reach to get it. There are many, unlike CERN, which was a real closure of Fermilab. There's only one lab of this nature in the world. There are many light sources in the world. This is a distribution. There are around 70 light sources in the world. I will discuss why it's very important for us that unlike CERN, which is really dedicated for one mission, here there are many, many missions. The basin of attraction is very large. You can study medicine, you can search the structure of medication, you can look at the structure of materials, you can detect pollution, use it doing environmental science, you can do biology, Adaionat, which got the Nobel Prize for chemistry, the messenger RNA structure was discovered on a light source of less quality than the one we have at CESAMI. There is chemistry, there is physics, geophysics, there is archeology. You can take papyrus several thousand years ago, you mentioned crete from crete, that if you would begin to play with it, it will become dust in your hands, you would destroy it, you put it inside a light source, you can read everything which is written on it. So it's really a very powerful and versatile tool. Now, the members of this light source come from the following countries. So you see Turkey and Cyprus, the Greek, not the Turkish part of Cyprus, the Greek part of Cyprus. You have Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Pakistan, these are the members. And now, right now, I will describe the journey. All of them are sitting not as entrepreneurs, but with the license of their government. Everybody there is sitting with their parliament approving it and with the government approving it. Okay, what are the objectives? So I said it many times, they were written also, but it's always good to repeat. So one wants to foster excellence in science and technology in the Middle East, reverse the brain drain, enhance the regional science and technological infrastructure and contribute to improve understanding of people coming from diverse backgrounds. So here are some photos from the journey. This moment here is very special for me because dreams are made out of fluffy stuff. And here this becomes metal. So touching this metal, this was delivered to CERN to be built and tested there by CERN Cezami. Teams was a very special moment, one could touch it, it was real. These are the boxes put in Jordan, these are the teams which put it together. Just, I think I show it to myself to be sure that it's real. And then eventually it even worked. This tells you that no shirts circuit around, the electrons actually move. Okay, now how did we reach there? So let's go back to concepts. So the first person to introduce this, as you said, was Abdus Salam and here I enrich, I give you the reference, not just the statement. So it didn't appear in science for understanding. It actually was an appeal to the Muslim world in order to be able to jump the big barrier and reach the more advanced knowledge. He suggested, and this is down in red, this was an attempt to emphasize it, he suggested to be able to build a light source in the Arab world which would help make a jump. So this is the first time I think that somebody identified the light source as a vehicle that society and the scientists in that society can really jump forward to the forefront. And I think that was full of insight. Okay, where did, sorry, Salam's picture disappeared in my rearranging, so it's somewhere there. But you can look at the wall and you can see it. Okay, so the dream was of the first director of ICTP. Now, Eleanor Roosevelt said the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Nice to believe that, ah, here he is. So I just switched these two. Now, beautiful dreams indeed are rare but they also come for free. And the issue and the work is how to actualize these dreams if to actualize them and then how to actualize them. So we are back to science for understanding and as I told you, infinite amount of optimism. I give you here a graph. I don't think you, if you see the red, can you see the red? If you see the red, it's the mood in the region and it violates, I think, role theorem by the fact that it has many more downwards than upwards. At least psychologically, one always feels that a new down is coming. On the other hand, if we look at Sesame, which is a green envelope, it started from nothing and it became real. So this is, on this background, if you would read the newspaper every day, look at television, know whether, if you sit in Italy, in Tehran or in Jerusalem, there's no way that such a thing can work. So as I said, you really need this infinite amount of optimism. I also would like to say that the project is kind of unique and I'll try to demonstrate it. First of all, very high quality scientists are involved. And this time, I'm not blowing my own trumpet. As I told you, I'm a string theorist and know very little about that. But the experimental scientists and engineers which were involved in bringing us to this place are really of the top quality. The science, we should aim, be of very high quality and I will discuss this because it will be very important along the road. And I think the dedication here of this group of people is quite unique because giving our surroundings, we should have all dropped it a long time ago. And nevertheless, the same faces appeared again and again and again. Here are some names of Israeli scientists involved. Above are the ones which did things on administrative level but the two first ones work on light sources and the rest are scientists which work on light sources. Okay, so let's say you want to do a common scientific project which is something we were actually thinking about here in Trieste a while ago and I'll come back to that. So how do you do it? One possibility is you go to the people who really understand everything, here they are and they go to the people they think are the right scientific advisors and they tell you that they would give money to you if you work on that project. So this is the top bottom approach. Then there is the other approach which is the bottom top approach that the scientists which know or think they understand what the important problems are, they come to their bosses and depending on the culture they may say it politely, they may shout, they may turn the table on the other person but in whatever language is in their culture they tell the other people you must put money in this so that there will be progress. Now my approach I must say is bottom top. I have no trust in the top that they are able on many issues I don't have trust but definitely not that they can give directions in science and I think it's a scientist which should give the directions. Okay, now the question what type of science to do? Small science. So ICTP is an example where small science made an enormous impact for decades and educated generation of people all over the world and this I must say is my favorite thing. Then there is big science. Big science is CERN, big science is Sesame. Not on the same scale but much bigger than the scale we are discussing when you discuss just interhuman correlation between two, three or four people. Okay, now those who know me well know that I hate to compromise even on one potato is not easy to compromise. However, on this issue I had no choice, I had to compromise. My choice would have been small science and bottom top and I will describe to you our effort together with ICTP CISA to do this but it ran into a wall which I will describe. So I realize that in my region it's impossible to do science which is not top bottom. You need the umbrella of the government in order to collaborate. Otherwise it's difficult enough with an umbrella but with no umbrella it is not going to happen. It cannot be like collaboration between friendly countries. It doesn't work that way. And governments are interested mainly in big projects. So to go to small science is very difficult. One has to go and do the large science thing. And for me it was very difficult to compromise. There is one thing however but I did but there is one thing which we did not compromise on which cost us I will describe was that you have to do good science and I want to say this again. I think ICTP again is an example. You are doing here forefront when you have now the spring workshop you are doing forefront research. You are not going to somewhere easy. You are going to the top trying to be at the top. And the same should be of any collaboration of this nature. I think it's better not to do a collaboration than to do a mediocre collaboration or worse than mediocre just to say we did a collaboration. No. If you do it it has to be the really top quality science. You must make every effort to make it top quality science. So on this there is no compromise. In addition in my course I would say that each side in order for a project to work it's essential that each side is essential. Each side can bring a contribution which is useful. Now if let's say God forbid there is a plague. So in some country which is not developed then of course you bring from a more advanced country a group of doctors they give the inoculations people don't understand the microbiology of why it works but they saved and they go that's okay. But I think if you really want to build a long term understanding it must be on the same level. So you must search for projects where each side is essential and each side can benefit. This is crucial for such projects to work. I also learned that Merlon Brando in his movie The Godfather was right. It's all personal and I will give you some examples where it was people which you never heard their names and will never hear their names but said in a position where they can make a decision and they helped the project to go in a positive direction. So I will come to that again but it's important for the young people who want to I will say here elaborate a little more for the future. If you come to someone it's a wonderful idea of course I will establish a committee to study it and so on forget it. You have to find in the organization a person who has the capability to decide on his own. He may afterwards have to call inside the organization but he or she can decide on their own and she can say yes I give you the money that you need and or I make the decision which is needed and I will give you some examples of where that happened of watershed moments where people for reasons okay I would say they were good people because they agreed with me so that's my definition of a good person but in any case they followed the route which they believed was correct. So it's all personal so the first personal thing for me was Sergio Fubini a very well-known well-respected particle physicist which I knew as a legend and thanks to my friend Daniela Mati I got also to know Fubini a little more not only as a legend and we had discussions and he viewed me as a naive leftist okay. If I'm naive or not okay that's one issue if I'm a leftist I can decide on my own but in any case he came to me after the Oslo Accords was signed and he told me look your naive ideas maybe we should try and investigate them now maybe now is the time to do it. And this was Ed Seren and he told me he loved to give assignments so he gave me two assignments one assignment in a symposium for his 65th birthday was and this is Sergio the late Sergio Fubini one thing he asked me to give a mini review on several new aspects of string theory I highly recommend Paul that you read it because it has in it the necessity of having not just strings but higher dimensional objects to appear there and as you see why strings and et cetera why only strings what else is possible I think it was an excellent review if I may say so but the main thing was that he asked me to go and research all Arab-Israeli collaborations there maybe I put here a word when it started it was Arab-Israelis and the fact we were very delighted when Iranian friends came in in Uppsala and when Turkish came in but in the beginning the idea was much more simple Arab-Israeli collaboration after Oslo agreement not we didn't view the region in its entirety okay so he sent me to do this I did it I went to the president of the Israeli Academy because they had a center in Cairo we still have a center in Cairo which is part of the Camp David accord with Egypt and I was told there that nothing works you should know you're wasting your time don't do it said okay what happened and so on okay there were some things which were success my lesson from this for example was the marine sciences in the Red Sea the marine sciences worked very well it is a collaboration between Egypt, Germany and Israel and it worked well because the Egyptians were fantastic phenomenologists they knew the area in an outstanding way and Germany and Israel bought the more modern equipment there so each side was essential you wouldn't know where to do the research without the Egyptians and the Egyptians benefited and learned a lot about how to use how to study marine biology so my basic take home lesson which I reported in Torino in this event was to say that you need to have a project where both parts contribute equally okay guided with this wisdom we went together to Egypt we went Sergio Fubini we went Jane Rostans the secretary of CERN myself we went there and we signed an agreement with the Egyptians under the umbrella of which we had many people together now this agreement this was in a period when you still had disks in the computer so the Italian embassy in Cairo had a Macintosh like the one that we had in Jerusalem so all the corrections could be done on the place we didn't need to wait for the secretaries to with tip-ex to correct all the mistakes I mean this generation doesn't know anything about it but once these were stumbling blocks highly non-trivial stumbling blocks and we signed together with Alberto Devoto actually was also a key person we signed an agreement to have and you see it's very important to sign an agreement now I by the way signed an agreement under no authority I was chairman of the department at the time of physics which gives me no authority to sign agreements with Egypt Sergio Fubini had no authority whatsoever and the only person with authority was the first under secretary of state in Egypt actually so we signed the agreement together and the decision was first of all we get to know each other it's a period of small science and bottom up so we tried that the first thing was we had a visit you see Sergio Fubini here of Egyptian physicist to the Hebrew University you can see how many years have passed if you look carefully at my photo but it's many years ago and I'm sure Albert Einstein would approve this was a portrait of him looking at us and we came up with a problem which Fernando faces every day per diem we have here the Egyptian scientist they come the budget in Egypt is very small for science who will pay for their hotel who will pay for the meals I can't do it for my research grants they are not for that so that was a very tough moment that was a watershed moment okay Sergio took I don't know why he had a check with him he took it out and said I'll sign a check I said come on Sergio you get a certain salary I get an Israeli salary this is not how the organization can work this is not a solution okay I'm not going to sign checks like that so what we did instead we called a number or two numbers actually at that moment from this office five minutes after this photo was taken both numbers were in trieste one number was one call was to Miguel Virasoro I told Miguel I called because Sergio was reluctant to ask favors I on Sesame I have no inhibitions as Fernando was mentioning gently so I went and I said look we are doing this we are in trouble we need money and anyhow this can't move ahead if we don't have some serious seed money so he asked how much do you need I don't know why I said 22,000 but I said 22,000 dollars he said okay I'll send you a letter and that's it so he was a person he could sit and say well I have to convene the council and we can discuss it and then why not give it to A, B, C or D why give it to this nevertheless on the spot he decided and with this he removed a major obstacle the other telephone was to the director of CISA asking him okay can you also help a little and he said yes I won't include say the amount because he may be put to trial I don't know later about that but Daniele also it took him a full two minutes to say yes please I support it and you have it so the moment these two answers yes came from Trieste from two institutes very near about we were able to move on otherwise it would have been the end a nice visit and that's it I also want to measure to mention Galiano Denardo who played in meetings which happened a key role very positive very supportive for the project okay then Daniele, Miguel and myself set in the house of Deviachi which is not this one I hope one day but it's a house which we were renting during a visit here we sat on a table it was a nice summer day and we were asking okay let's build the program and mainly let's make the where is it here let's make the logo you know that logo is very important so this logo was done on the table in I don't remember if it was Daniele or Miguel which would make the drawing definitely not me I have no talent for drawing and we put here in Italian physics in English in Arabic and in Hebrew and this was the logo of a meeting of a very high quality which we convened in Dahab in Egypt and if you look at the names of the countries which agreed to spend money you see together Palestine, Egypt, Israel I don't think ever before or ever after they appeared as funding agencies of the same project on the same billboard maybe one day with Iran will appear also so here you see Cairo, Cairo, Amman and of course Italian institutes Italy played and will play a key role in this okay the meeting was under it was if you wish a Hollywood production I would say in Austrian Schmalz it had a red bedwind tent nevertheless the way it started was unbelievable Venice Gauda, the ministers of education of Egypt told us the way she started the meeting was everybody stand up for one minute of silence to commemorate Yitzhak Rabin who was murdered by an Israeli three weeks earlier so you had over a hundred people from Palestine from Morocco, from Jordan, from Israel all standing one minute of silence for this this was a fantastic gesture which I think gave the direction of the whole meeting okay we had support international we had support by international people from CERN, from Princeton all on the background of the bedwind discussing like you are discussing in the spring school you have here serious discussions in this red tent it appeared on the CERN courier this is Jacob Ziv, the president of the academy in Israel he invented the dot zip if you ever use zip he's the person who invented it and the reason the poor person had to go all the way from Jerusalem to come there because he made a bet with me that nothing will come out of what I do so the result of the bet was that he had to he had to come and be part of the opening this was taken the picture was taken by Maurice Jacob who also spent there well by then I learned that you have to sign agreement so we signed the detailed agreement on the future every we had an umbrella which covered every possible collaboration and this was actually the high point of small science bottom top because we really influenced here with the opinion of the people okay unfortunately about half a year later while we were planning a big meeting on El Nino I remember Miguel was very interested then in climate and it was supposed to be on El Nino which had a lot of effects in various places in the world and we had already all the lecturers it was all ready to have the follow up meeting the money was available everything was there but then one of our wars with Lebanon started again and the whole atmosphere in the region changed I should mention that the ministers of education when we met her in Cairo told us the chief Mubarak told her to take politics out of science so he made a political decision take politics out of science collaborate I don't mind and that enabled the Egyptians which were interested to collaborate to collaborate however after the thing in Lebanon the political decision was bring back politics into science so this collaboration was over we could not do that anymore we retreated with no dignity from the area which was where we wanted to be we had to retreat and we retreated where not to Torino again to Villa Gualino maybe some of you have spent some time there and there we asked ourselves what to do next and one of the things we had in mind in addition to particle physics was also had to have a light source now the idea of having a light source I will tell you after what's who brought it to us was not in our main line because we were high energy physicists and I should say that actually in Israeli-Palestinian agreement about Palestinian involvement in Atlas experiments did work also Sesame doesn't get a lot of publicity which has its merits but that definitely got no publicity but Palestinians worked in the Israeli group and in Atlas which was one good thing now in Israel we don't live in houses we live in apartments and I have neighbors and they heard about it so the neighbors were kind enough to drop their opinion on what I'm doing so this I see that I have a neighbor who is very conscious I don't know who didn't put his name but he's very conscious because he puts the exact date when this appeared and so on this is not just something he printed on his own and where he says that the Egyptian press is anti-Semitic and okay now I know that and actually it's true there is a large extent of Egyptian press which is very unpleasant to us but I think if we count all the negative things we never move forward you try to identify the positive things you don't put the emphasis on the negative here was the discussion on having the first time we were thinking on the possibility of having where that beam lines and detectors for synchrotron radiation we thought maybe we'd think of bigger projects because the smaller ones don't work and it was at that meeting that the late Gaswos the German scientist who worked in the US and in Hamburg came and he said that there is a machine in Germany that is going to become it's called Bessie which is in Berlin which is the Germans are going to junk and why isn't it a great idea that we bring a synchrotron to the Middle East which is that machine and they came up with this proposal okay so we have failed with bottom top we have now to go to larger science and let's look at this problem so what are the advantages of the suggestion of Gaswos and also Herman Winnick from Stanford the suggestion is a light source is a place where you can have in the Middle East in our area a critical mass of sciences which is credible if you build let's say that a rich an oil rich country gave money to build a CERN or an FCC in the Middle East for the scientists in the Middle East we don't have a critical mass to start starting it on the other hand if you think of a light source where so many branches of science can do experiments there is a possibility to build a critical mass and actually one of the only advantages of waiting so many years to doing it we did build and educated a large critical mass of people to do that so it isn't a good idea to do a light source it will enable to build a credible critical mass we went to Uppsala therefore the first time we met the Iranian representatives and the Turkish representatives at that stage Fubini left and the Hervik shopper the director general of CERN took over he recruited Khaled Tukan which you saw in the movie before which is Jordanian which played an essential role in the motion so now we head on the table and now this is a test to the class we are given an old defunct German machine should we take it or leave it what does the vote say should we take an old machine which the Germans don't want anymore should we bring it to the Middle East yes or no he's always a contrarian okay so of course the answer is no no way we should do such a thing no respectable scientist will want to come and work in a machine because scientists as you know and it's good they're selfish they want also their research they're sometimes are willing to look at a broader aspect but they care about their research so let's say Adai or not it would say no way I'm not going to touch a machine which has been thrown away so no way to take it and as Daniela said we took it now why did we take it what was the logic behind taking it so the logic was dreams as I said are made out of fluffy material by the time now it's not just an Arab-Israeli issue we have Iran we have Pakistan and we have Turkey these are countries which don't usually collaborate on anything positive so how to build a framework to do such a thing if you have nothing to talk about nobody will agree to discuss with you such a thing unless there is something concrete so we took it as something concrete now when I was a postdoc in the US I learned that in the US a company which this is broadcast so I can't say the name developed a tactic which is called bait and switch in other words you write a sale that you're going to sell this happened to me four tires for a very cheap price but when you arrive to the shop unfortunately they've sold them all and now you have to go to something which is much more expensive so this was our idea we are going to take this machine and build around its administrative structure because we cannot work without an administrative structure and then we will tell everybody come on if we did work together to build an administrative structure of course you will not let us work on such a machine unfortunately the tactic didn't work that simple and for many years Sesame was stained by the fact that people in key positions including the European Union said this is an old machine we are not going to give any money for that so but I still don't regret that decision we had no other choice we had to make it something concrete we went in 1999 to Paris was one of the not nice experiences because then the diplomats came in and they played their usual tapes of attacking each other so we tried to minimize having diplomats around and at that stage one would have to have a decision of where to have the machine so there were requests from many countries and I won't now go through the whole list which requested it but in any case I in the year 2000, the 15th of March I went to Amman to a hotel to discuss with Khaled Toukan where Israel would like to have this machine so we can participate so Iran volunteered but we know that it's a one way ticket for Israeli scientists so it's not realistic Armenia suggested it but it's not realistic for anybody to travel there we wanted something in the region okay so it was as I said the 15th of March 2000 this was before the second Intifada I went to Amman, I discussed with Khaled Toukan I told him look Israel will support Jordan but under one condition that you will appoint a Palestinian director general this is the one condition Khaled Toukan now it sounds unbelievable okay but this was the Israeli decision it was not my own this was a consultation and we said we will support Jordan if you have a director general there which is Palestinian Khaled Toukan who comes from a family he came earlier in the 20th century but he comes from a Palestinian family himself Toukan so this was agreed upon now we had to decide where in Jordan to do it so even though I come from the Hebrew University I have a soft heart to Weitzman Institute as well and I said it needs to be a place where scientists from Weitzman Institute which are further from Jordan can put in a sample and in two and a half hours be there with a postdoc, a student, a professor so we went through the places no you need a map okay so Toukan sent his helper to look for a map now I don't know how many visited the Middle East do you think there was a problem when he brought the map back to find the place where to have it which is from Weitzman Rehovot a certain distance Israel doesn't appear on the map so you just have this big vacuum there so it's not so easy to identify okay so I used my advanced geographic knowledge and where actually we measured and the decision we had the common decision on where to do it on my way back I went by Jordanian Airlines now I think one way you can distinguish a theoretical physicist is you give him a paper or her a paper in his profession in his area of research and you know that in one minute he will look at the references is he referenced there or not so when you when I went I'm sitting in a Jordanian airline I want to see do I have a reference does Israel exist on the map so you see there is a place to make palace for Palestine there is a place for everybody on this map but somehow there was not enough place to put the word Israel so I know that I'm not naive and I know that the world is complicated and nevertheless I say this should not block us from trying to move forward okay I'm showing you now the original designs from Jordan there was a competition at CERN where this should happen and this is the original designs the Jordanians wanted it near Amman in a place called Alan these are the where they presented it this is the place on 11th of April not far from today it would be almost 19 years ago we went to CERN there was a whole story which I can't say when it's recorded on why it happened that the Palestinian DG was not elected but it was not Israel's fault and Jordan was chosen as a site for the place then the council approved that Jordan would be the place and the advantage of Jordan was stable nothing is very stable in our region but relatively stable place and had free access and guaranteed free access to all scientists so any other country there would be problems either it would be too far away or there would not be access for all scientists involved so we chose it okay we started the switch we said that the old German machine is not what is going to help us but in the meantime we shifted in June 2002 quite a while ago now both of us Munchen work on complexity so I want to give you an example of complexity so okay Matsura became Professor Matsura became the director general of UNESCO to become a director general of UNESCO if any of you has the vision to do that it's good to come with a dowry so Japan gave a dowry to UNESCO and this put money as a discretion of Matsura that means he can make a decision without going to the general assembly so Hervik Schoper convinced him to give money for what for scientists in Novosibirsk so they don't play other games give them money they go to Berlin, put it in boxes put it on this ship the boxes I call them Lego boxes because it says install one into two and two into three and three into four put them in a place in Jordan and you have the machine now till today most of that machine is stored there the only part we took from there is the booster which we need but is now a part which really needs to be replaced but it did allow us to be this nucleus around which we built what we did in January 2003 the place there was an inauguration of the place in the presence of the King of Jordan and the Royal Court in Jordan was very supportive for Sesame from the moment from the beginning and was very generous in its donation this was the original idea you're more familiar about LHC, ATLA, CMS, LHCB and Alice it works here differently there are many beam lines you can go and visit Eletra it's a different type of design and arrangement so what you see in the middle is a circle where the electrons accelerate and then you see the beam lines Bahrain at the time was involved now it's not anymore these are all dreams I mean these were designs not the true thing this is what the Jordanians said they will do okay and then it started getting built and it was built by Rafiq Sarraf a Palestinian contractor working in Jordan he actually built the place because we live near earthquake country like Slack you need to have very solid foundation so it was a very complex thing to build the foundations of the place and here it is a visiting group coming and here I'm taking you for a short visit from Israel I know your Hebrew is not good but you can listen nevertheless so this is a ride you go through a city called Asalt it's about one hour from the border with Jordan you go up the mountain and you reach the place and there it is then five years later the building was ready now, okay okay come on we, you spent a lot of time on ADS CFT many of you right, many of us so we all know that the boundary is enough right if you have the information we can call about firewalls but if you have information about the boundary you know to build definitely a lot of the bulk right okay so here it says to me from outside we have a well-defined boundary okay it's not a sphere but one can work on this boundary this is inside do we need to fill it? I think any serious believer in ADS CFT would say it's redundant I mean we already have all the information on the boundary so it kind of tests your confidence and this is was really very very problematic because for years this was a situation there there was no money the Jordanians gave money for the building but there was no further money so now you have to put the puzzle together so Chris Lowell and Smith another director general of CERN agreed to take the baton from Hervick Shopper and moved on I think till today he made me a little regrets he didn't realize into what he enters when he enters the Middle East but I would say it's in the opposite way we, the presidents of our council up to now were Hervick Shopper, Lowell and Smith and Drollfoyer all of them director generals of CERN I think there are very few places which can say that they were given the trust that people were willing to give the precious time after they retire from an important job to spend between the quarreling people in the Middle East sit there and bring a project so I think this really reflects the trust and I hope we stood up to the trust James Gillis is a person who brought the Higgs to 1.3 billion people by doing the let's call it public relations for CERN so he is now volunteering also time with the agreement of CERN for Sesame okay this was a bad situation we brought him Nobel laureates to write to the European Union to give money didn't help so we began to build the bulk but now also we should remember when we build the bulk not all the bulk is the same so what did we build there to fill it we filled it with shielding radiation but there was nothing inside which would radiate there was no machine but we built the shielding so at least it doesn't look so empty and it's much cheaper the programs they do try to do in this region to reflect some show of cohesiveness are actual artificial they try to show people meeting together kids playing together that's not real this is real thing everybody thinks he's benefiting from it okay so I don't know to read Hebrew so you don't see the next question this is one of the sharpest TV interviewers in Israel who came here and he's speaking to a professor Salman Salman which is a Palestinian and the Palestinians is actually saying very positive things about the project he says this is a real thing it's not just bringing children together to play so then the commentator says what do you mean it's a real thing it's empty what are you talking about so his answer which he got cut off it was if people want to fill it it will be full and he was right okay now I want to give you one incident I like to study singularities and their role in string theory if they are resolved or not so let me give you an example of a singularity end of a contribution of a small person you never heard of and will never hear again about so it's the first of June 2010 I'm waking up at 4 I arrived to Cairo at 3 o'clock in the morning I like to sleep late so I woke up at around 11 I opened the TV and I saw on CNN that Israeli commanders have attacked the Turkish fleet which came to Gaza in particular the ship Mavi Marmara and that they are supposedly heavy casualties okay there were no more details the meeting started two hours later okay I want I can't again because people hear everything I can't say everything but I can say the following in the meeting in the big the certain representative of the country said I want Israel to be condemned Sezame should condemn Israel for their attack on the Mavi Marmara okay I think that the president of the council should have stopped it at that point because we have a decision we don't discuss political issues we don't condemn anybody we discuss science we can in the evening condemn whoever we want but we don't it's not part of our policy to do condemnations I stood up and I said if we do continue this discussion I'm leaving I have no interest I'm not a diplomat there are many organizations which I'm sure are going to deal with this in the future I'm wasting my time if this is what we are doing and I'm afraid Israel will leave as well okay again instead of being stopped at that stage it continued and the certain delegate who wanted to get the condemnation turned to the Turkish delegate this is the Turkish delegate on the left side Ulko Dinser and he said what do you say now I when I was a child I read the books of Perry Mason who is a lawyer lawyer detective stories in the United States and one of the things which he taught his assistants never ask a question that you don't know the answer to so in this case the question was asked but he didn't know the answer a priori so Dinser could have said many things he's a diplomat he's not a scientist he could have said I need to call Ankara I need to make a committee of course I condemn everything instead he said look I have a story to tell you I don't know if the story is true maybe Paul and Fernando will eventually confirm it he said when the British Academy was formed it got stuck for a long time discussing religious issue and it didn't go anywhere so at a certain stage there was a decision let's do here science and humanities and forget religion let's not discuss religion and from then the British Academy flourished okay my proposition he said is we even though people of my country are probably were probably killed here my suggestion is we don't discuss politics it says the moment he said it the whole thing evaporated so here was a person which had the foresight and the courage because again he's a diplomat diplomats don't make policy they tell you what the government's policy is and he took the decision to say let's leave it so he at this moment he says it says on me so again it's all personal I don't know I met him several years later he remembered very well the moment he said I thought it's the right thing to do so having these people which do the right thing is rare but they help move things okay it's still I hope you enjoy our shielding it's perfect but now we need to build up the bulk so at this stage I took an initiative I spoke actually with the Egyptians the Turks and the Jordanians and I said if I bring money from Israel to kickstart I don't put the Iranians in a position to have to answer me such a question so if I find a way to get $5 million from Israel can you also get money so people see we are serious and we give our own money to build things so I went to the finance ministry you see these two guys nobody in Israel knows them not their name before not after they are in Israel in general and the finance ministry is a group which we call Naarea Otsar it means dismissively the kids of the finance ministry because they have a lot of authority they can decide which projects to support and which not I came to them I told them about the project I was sure they would throw me away they said take us to Jordan and here they are sitting in Jordan they came back and they said if the other countries contribute we agree to contribute so a letter came out from Israel telling professor Khaled Tukan that if other countries will contribute not naming just saying other countries contribute then we will agree to go and then we were very happily in a way surprised that somebody in Tehran said we want to give also and this was very helpful because Egypt was before Mubarak when they said yes and afterwards total turmoil so there was no answer okay so we had a meeting and now I want to show you something which is rather unique on March 10th, 2012 it's a small room in Amman and you will see together representatives from Turkey, from Iran, from Israel and Jordan and the ex-officio, a Palestinian and an Egyptian and it takes 28 seconds each country pledges five million dollars now you know that these countries are not the usual bedfellows so to have them in the same room together each committing this amount of money is something special so here it is this is the Egyptian ex-officio Salman Salman you already met he was ex-officio these are the Turkish head of the Atomic Energy Commission in Turkey Jordanians, these are the two and Iranians which I'm sure you recognize and then one is Israeli the one for whom it's easy because he doesn't get signed the check but next to him is the one who signs the check so let's see, I've signed them that's it, it's all over and this was another watershed moment because the moment that happened finally the European Union listened to us after years of not listening and telling us that we have an old machine they agreed to give five million euro to CERN where teams of Cezami and CERN would test magnets so that they can be used at Cezami afterwards Italy came in again in a crucial way I won't say that none of you heard of Nando Feroni that won't be true but I think in many other places nobody has heard about Nando and he actually volunteered in a two-minute discussion I had with him is Eritre he agreed to give the money he said, how much do you want? I said, five million, he said, okay I remember his immortal words I'll scratch the bottom of the barrel okay, I didn't know if it's serious or not he approached me in the evening he said the minister wants a half page document about it and that's it Italy committed the amount of money out of which four million have been used I don't know the full five will be used but four millions have been used so this was really a watershed moment because now with a shoestring budget we could go forward we could have the magnets we could begin to have the machines this is now 2015 has components from many countries these are, again, for me to be sure that this is real and it is we're approaching the end so I do that then on May 16th, 2017 there was an inauguration again, I'm sorry I'm showing picture of myself because that's what I kept but as I'm sure that there are another paper, different pictures this was a ceremony this is with Khaled Toukan this person was there in Dahab and he came Edward came again also to the ceremony here and do you recognize this person? Carlos Moedas he was the commissioner for research of the European Union he totally, personally because he was a good friend of somebody called Gago who was a student of Chopper and he personally turned around the policy of the European Union and made it a major donor to Sesame very important so it began to work the machine is working we are training people you have, again, the big support of Giorgio Paolucci was at Elektra Hartel from Germany was crucial in training the people you see lots of training here you see the building now nobody asked me a question about Photoshop because this building which I showed you had two different roofs once it was and some of the photos I showed you it was grey and in others it's green okay this was like in a physics seminar when you try to slide something and nobody caught it but okay how did that work? so I think we were tested from above many times I'm sure Daniela remembers the earthquake in Dahab people, it was a 6.9 on the Richter Strait earthquake we were in Dahab in Noeba and Shara Mashech people died we were protected there was a group of people which went to Mount Sinai and so we shake so I think the signals from above were very clear now came another test on the 15th of December 2013 it snowed in Jordan the amount that what we say in Israel the elders of Jordan do not remember such a snow now in normal places where snow is an everyday occurrence you know when you have snow on the roof you clean it there the whole roads nobody the roads were stuck nobody went to the roof and as a result the whole thing collapsed but we again had a protection because there was nothing inside except radiation shielding so no damage was caused okay so this is why we have two colors of roof and to change luck now we put this roof now these are the beam lines you don't have experts here in this I would just say that on day one there are two beam lines number one and number two that there have been 103 proposals all together to work there countries here you see Cyprus if you are interested you see 12 from Iran you see four from Israel from Italy from Jordan Mexico Pakistan and now there's already on the 11th of March this year there was a decision so from your own country you can see how many have been on one of the beam lines have been approved and this is on the other beam line what has been approved so actually we are going to start having the real good quality machines starting to work with the experiments being done now a few slogans slogan number one I think that the scientists in their drive broke boundaries and took the project and their countries to where no one had the right to expect okay but I think the main thing is that once the governments realized where they are they didn't blink this is a surprising thing this of my big fear was that once they begin to realize where they are people all over the region would say forget it they let this go on why maybe one day I will know I don't know why in my country and I don't know why in other countries because I see all the forces in both sides which would say stop it and nevertheless it goes on then this is something I show now in the United States because Europe, the United States all of them have very clear vision on how our region should work every detail ask them they know the answer but then when they ask to give money suddenly they begin to stammer it's not under the right umbrella we don't know so this is what the Pakistani said about it which requires money you don't hear anything this is a political value now don't ask me more about it which means ask me that you have to have political value so otherwise the sum of 25 million euro is maybe less than the cost of an F-16 ok so this was really for many years not understood but Europe as I said changed its attitude and it's very positive helping and these are the people in Europe responsible for that again one name you do know but the other name of Bernard Fabian I'm sure you don't know and he played a crucial role and this is the amount of money which were given up to now which is beginning to accumulate into real money our situation in the US we visited a wing of the White House once Obama twice Trump the Trump administration sounded more positive than the Obama administration so maybe something will happen this was less than a month ago I'm not sure what is going to happen from my point of view the future I think we did something which maybe nobody expected as true mathematicians we showed an existence it's possible to do that people from the region scientists driven can do such a project together and work for two decades together so that can be done nobody can tell us it can't be done we showed it can be done we will be judged I think by the quality of the science and this is a very big test now and we are working on a shoestring budget so this is still a problem on the good side I would say that we are proudly we are the first from February 2019 this year we are the first green accelerator we are totally driven by solar power okay I can explain why we had to do it but it's a fact first accelerator which does that we have ICTP help for things that Fernando mentioned this is a nice place to visit now I'm sure many of you envy me for my tourism in Petra which is the only time I did tourism because the council met on my request for my wife that it be in Petra so we could see Petra now this is if you see such a picture I think it depicts more about our region than what I showed you before okay I'm not naive things are complicated we don't live in a neutral area and nevertheless things go forward now I come to near the end what is this okay I will tell you what this is this is a single person the background is black like in our region but there are spots of white the spot of white here is a person it's a Jordanian worker who is trying to put in foundations for something different and he's sticking in the steel into the concrete and there will be more poured afterwards on it and the light somehow shines from him so I have this in my living room in my dining living room and I believe this is a good representation of our situation background black but a small source of light which is white I finished with this I'm sorry for the Hebrew you have to improve it so what is the moment that you are waiting for to see the light the light the light at the end of the tunnel the light at the end of the tunnel I think this is the most appropriate way to end it I think many people in the young generation the reason are waiting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and we should try and help them whenever we can thank you