"Since the unlimited seems irreconcilable with the world, EST ignites the comparison between different languages ​​to unhinge beliefs and build bridges, thus opening a passage that projects reflection towards new horizons capable of freeing the conscience from cramped spaces of what we take for granted. It is important to make this effort, because in what we take for granted lies our deepest terror: the belief that we are mortal, that is, totally annihilable. Understanding what eternity means allows us to think about it beyond the limit of death." (Ines Testoni)

"This conference wants to make explicit the languages ​​that speak of finitude, considering the concept of eternity as the pivot on which to rotate ancient and new definitions of the relationships between limit and infinity, emptiness and matter, nothing and being , physics and metaphysics, mortality and immortality." (Ines Testoni)

SCIENTIFIC DIRECTION:

Ines Testoni
is psychologist, psychotherapist and philosopher, professor of Social psychology and director of the Master in “Death Studies & the End of life” at University of Padova. She is also a research fellow at University of Haifa (Israel)
Fabio Scardigli
is a theoretical physicist. After his PhD in General Relativity at the University of Bern (CH), he worked at Yukawa Institute in Kyoto (Japan), at LeCosPA Cosmology Center in Taipei (Taiwan), and at Institute Lorentz in Leiden (Netherlands)
Andrea Toniolo
studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University-Rome. He spent some time to study and research in Tübingen (Germany), at the Faculty of Catholic Theology (1993-1994)

NOBEL LECTURES:

Gerard ‘t Hooft
1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions"

has contributed to the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics of the last fifty years. Already in his PhD thesis, he renormalized the Yang-Mills theories, opening the way to electroweak theory, to quantum chromodynamics (theory of quarks), and finally to the Standard Model of elementary particles. He then turned his attention to Gravity, formulating in 1993 the Holographic Principle, which has been from then an illuminating guide for researchers in String Theory and Quantum Gravity. And, not least, in the last twenty years he developed his controversial deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, following the footsteps of Einstein. For these achievements he received many prizes, among which the Wolf Prize in 1981 and the Nobel Prize in Physics 1999.

Roger Penrose
2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity"

revolutionized General Relativity in 1965, introducing new powerful topological techniques to study the singularity problem. With his younger colleague Stephen Hawking, he developed the famous singularity theorems: if General Relativity is true, there must be a space-time singularity in the past (the Big Bang), and there must be singularities in the future (black holes). Then, Penrose also made fundamental contributions to quantum theory, proposing that the (spontaneous) collapse of the wave function is due to gravitational interaction. Experiments are designed in these years to verify this hypothesis. In the early 1990s, he tackled the problem of consciousness, finding evidence for the non-algorithmic nature of the mind and therefore its non-reproducibility on a machine. Among the many prizes, he received the Wolf Prize in 1988, the Dirac Medal, and the Nobel Prize for Physics 2020.