Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where high-school teachers meet researchers and receive training, as well as discuss ways to improve science education and popularization in schools and outside.

I will be discussing the subject of "Science popularization with blogs" on Wednesday afternoon and then, two days later, I will be the last speaker with another short talk, where I will try to summarize some ideas on the matter. And you might help for this latter presentation.

I'm nostalgic tonight. The reason ? The Tevatron has finally stopped running, for good.

It's strange to find out one can mourn the shutdown of a synchrotron just as the passing away of an old friend, but that's more or less how I feel like tonight. And I am not even among the ones who can claim to have been around for the full duration of the machine's lifetime, like Giorgio Chiarelli - as Giorgio recounted here, he was there in the CDF control room when the first proton-antiproton beams collided the first time, in 1985.

Tomorrow is the last day on duty. For twenty-six years the Tevatron collider, the four-mile-long accelerator of the Fermi laboratory in Batavia (IL), has provided the CDF and DZERO experiments with proton-antiproton collisions at 1.8 and then 1.96 Tera-electron-Volts, allowing the investigation of fundamental physics at the highest available energy.

I received today a very nice video which commemorates the Tevatron collider. The video was produced by a colleague, Rob Snihur, together with an artist friend of his, Maria Scileppi. I hope you like it! A text is also available on Maria's site.

The organizers of TEDx Flanders did produce in a very timely manner very professional videos of the event, so you can follow offline the talks, including mine. However, what I said is not exactly what I had planned to say. Further, you might not want to spend your time looking at a recording. So for the record, I am pasting here my unamended script. Later on I will also post here the slides I showed while talking, which cannot be seen in the video.

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Thousands of physicists, engineers, computer scientists, modern-age seers have worked at it for the last twenty years.