Not yet official, but safe enough to be announced here: prof. Fernando Ferroni is the new INFN president. The charge will need to be confirmed by the Minister of Instruction and Research, Mariastella Gelmini (yes, the lady who said neutrinos travel in a 732 km long tunnel underground from CERN to Gran Sasso), but this is just a formal step.

Nando Ferroni is full professor at the University "La Sapienza" of Roma. He is an experimental particle physicist with a background in neutrino experiments (at CERN in the eighties) and collider physics (with the L3 experiment at LEP, and then with Babar at PEP2).

The TEDx crew has been quite fast to make available on youtube the video of the presentation I gave together with Peter Woit in Antwerp yesterday. You can give a look at it here.

Unfortunately the slides are not simultaneously available, but I will fix that by pasting them here.

For now, just the video. Enjoy!

(By the way, my name has been misspelled in the title in a less than conventional way this time - but they're working to fix it).

Yesterday's event at TEDx in Antwerp, in the gorgeous Flemish Opera, was followed by an enthusiastic audience of 1000. I spoke in the afternoon and tried to explain what it is that we do at CERN with these protons and the complicated machines we use. I must say I had never spoken in front of such a large audience (although I had played the fourth Brandemburg concerto by Bach a few times in front of similar numbers, but that was 30 years ago), and my heart rate went to about 160 for the whole duration of my speech. I went blank a couple of times (forgot the succession of things I wanted to say from my script, that is), but nobody noticed, and it was a great performance according to the listeners and the organizers.

So, as I had announced a bit prematurely three days ago, the Opera experiment is about to release the results of a measurement that is bound to stir endless discussions.