Foto de Eduardo Margareto

The relationship between civil society and the world of Science is an unusual one, a mix of curiosity, respect, admiration… and also fear. This ambiguity should not be an obstacle—on the contrary. Together, we should seek the opportunities that allow our society to maintain its high standard of living in a world where limited resources and the need for sustainability present new challenges.

The rapid advances in our scientific world have divided society: between those who see an opportunity to elevate our knowledge and those who fear that a discovery might escape our control. It’s impossible to list all the sciences that generate such feelings, but the most common today is artificial intelligence. It is spreading across all aspects of our lives, with very positive immediate implications, but also some concern about control and its impact on the labor market. Hence the question: will we survive as humans and individuals through these changes? Should the precautionary principle become a justification for our doubts and lack of understanding?

Being able to reconsider our conservatism despite our ignorance is already an important step toward Science. And it’s not unbearable—there are precedents. We have accepted to delegate democracy to parliamentarians, the execution of justice to judges, so why not delegate innovation to scientists? As another example of the “normalization of Science,” we have chosen the long road of the vacuum, of its pursuit to its normalization in our daily lives.

The vacuum was revealed as such in 1644 by Torricelli; in 1646, the wise Pascal confirmed the theory, and in 1855, the scientist Heinrich Geissler invented the first vacuum pump. More than 380 years later, it is a technology we pay for daily in our lives, our work, our hospitals, and in the manufacturing processes of many commercial products.

But is “nothingness” equivalent to the vacuum?

As a scientist, I would categorically answer: No! According to the “American Vacuum Society” (1958), the term refers to a space filled with gases at a total pressure lower than atmospheric pressure, meaning that the degree of vacuum increases directly as the residual gas pressure decreases. This means the lower the pressure, the greater the vacuum, which allows us to classify the degree of vacuum based on increasingly lower pressure intervals.

We get closer to nothingness, but it is not nothing.

The “zero” of nothingness is not a scientific notion that fits the logarithmic scale of the vacuum. That assimilation of “zero” with “nothingness” created strong confrontations and tensions among philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and theologians. The starting point being: Can the vacuum be materialized?

As a human being evolving in a three-dimensional space, the laws of physics with logarithmic scales are always surprising. Although we have become accustomed to a shift from 5 to 6 on the Richter scale implying a tenfold increase in severity, it is not easy for people to grasp that vacuum and pressure also follow logarithmic laws. It is even harder when trying to explain the mechanisms: the first three decades of pressure are dominated by the volume of gas. Then comes surface outgassing. At higher vacuum or lower pressures, the dominant factors become hydrogen diffusion from the material and permeation—i.e., the “transparency” of the walls. And hence, with a slight digression, the great scientist Wolfgang Pauli said: “God made the matter, the surface was invented by the devil,” to express the complexity of a surface.

And to conclude with the example of the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, where the Higgs boson was confirmed, which characterizes the existence of mass in the Standard Model! Vacuum science has reached overwhelming levels. With a lifetime of over a thousand hours, protons in the LHC travel 1.5 million times the distance from Earth to the Moon with zero probability of colliding with an atom or molecule of residual vacuum! It is not “nothingness,” it is a vacuum lower than that of interstellar space on the far side of the Sun—and with no risk to people!

José Miguel Jiménez Carvajal / «Talentos con Acento»

José Miguel Jiménez Carvajal (1968), Head of the Technology Department at CERN, holds a PhD in applied physics and surface physics from the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay-Paris (FR) and from the University of Clermont-Ferrand (FR). He joined CERN in 1994 as a physicist in the vacuum group, working on the energy upgrade of the LEP, the large electron-positron collider. Two years later, he was appointed project leader for the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) as a future injector of the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider.

In 2002, he was appointed section leader and took responsibility for the installation, preparation, and commissioning of the straight sections of the LHC. He was later promoted to Head of the Vacuum, Thin Films, and Surfaces Group, integrating all aspects of engineering, instrumentation, and thin film processes (chemical or plasma) at CERN.

Since 2014, Dr. Jiménez has led the Technology Department at CERN, responsible for technologies related to particle accelerators—a team of over 700 people key to accelerator operation, research, and development of new projects at CERN.

Dr. Jiménez is an expert in vacuum technologies for high-intensity and high-energy particle beams, as well as in phenomena induced by beam circulation, including electron cloud mechanisms.

He serves as a scientific advisor to CIEMAT, IFMIF DONES, and LIP, oversees institutional collaborations with ITER (France) and FAIR (Germany), and has served as CERN’s liaison officer with Spain since 2012.

In 2016, he was awarded the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise, with the rank of Commander, in a ceremony held on July 12, 2016, at the National Library of Spain.