It is born by chance – and also a little out of necessity, to say it with Monod, which always ends. Who would have been Einstein if he had been born on an atoll in Papua? And could a Papuan born in the maternity ward of San Raffaele in Milan become president of Assolombarda?
Who knows, maybe geographic coordinates matter more than DNA. What is certain is that Giulia Bignami is the daughter of two famous astrophysicists and published by Baldini + Castoldi “The astronomical raft”, subtitled “How to survive a father scientist” (125 pages, 16 euros). For clarity, the reader is warned on the cover that it is a novel.
I don’t know if it’s a novel. It is certainly a fun book that I recommend to get out of the gloomy times, forget Salvini, Meloni and many Pd and 5-star faces for a few hours, and take a bath of intelligence (humor and intelligence are almost the same thing).
“Nanni” for everyone
For the uninitiated, Giovanni Fabrizio Bignami, for all Nanni, enemies included, unfortunately he is no longer there. He left in 2017 due to a sudden illness that found him while he was passing through Madrid (he always traveled the world, one day here, one night there like the song by Patty Pravo, and even for a stroke it would have been difficult to find him ). Nanni was, in fact, a prominent astrophysicist, he had discovered a strange celestial object that could not be there but it was there, and he had married his colleague Patrizia Caraveo, herself a leading astrophysicist. As a scientist he studied high-energy celestial objects but on his business card was written President, which was always good, just update the line below: Inaf (National Institute of Astrophysics), ASI, Italian Space Agency, Cospar (World Committee for space research), SKA (future intercontinental radio telescope), Cnes (Center d’Etudes Spatiales, Toulouse). Incidentally, Nanni Bignami was also a very pleasant popularizer, a title is enough: “We are the Martians” (Zanichelli).
Bear trap
Anyone will appreciate the irony, and also the affection and regret, which cross the pages of the “Astronomical Raft”, but whoever has known Nanni well, a little Patrizia and quite a few characters who appear in the book, will find the reading hilarious. It will be discovered that Nanni wanted to burn only wood found in inaccessible places in the fireplace, that he organized safaris of artificial satellites on the terrace of his house, that he had a serious addiction to rotten substances he called cheeses, which to say darkness said “zero photons” and fell in boar traps disseminated in Liguria by the Viet Cong (but he was willing to fall back on a weaker hypothesis: banal bear traps), who played for the secret services at every change of government (with consequent change of the body to be presided over). But you will also discover a tender, affectionate father, a poet of occasional nursery rhymes who hugged his daughter while dancing and said to her “You and I dance even without music”.
Irresistible game
An irresistible game is to identify the big names in science never mentioned but of which Giulia traces an unequivocal identikit: the Nobel laureate astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi who, literally, hides behind a finger; the geneticist Edoardo Boncinelli who observes “If the males are XY and the females XX, then Valeria Marini must be XXX”; Carlo Rubbia, another Nobel laureate, with a certain identification by measuring the radioactivity of American 242 with a Geiger counter, which with his fingers collects the last grains of Milanese risotto left on the plate; Rita Levi Montalcini who, according to Nanni, was held together by hairspray, astronaut Paolo Nespoli explaining the functioning of the toilet in microgravity, Margherita Hack dancing with Nanni in front of Piero Angela to make people understand the synchronous motion of rotation and revolution of the moon.
Happy ending. Giulia outlived her father and mother despite being “exposed to too many madmen” and is now a clinical researcher in Edinburgh. Side note. The book opens with a “Preface against the prefaces” imposed and signed by the writer Massimiliano Parente, 15 lines and 2 vulgarities that do wrong to a well-educated text. The prefator states that it is his first and last preface. As for me, I take him at his word.
With the book closed, a doubt: did I have more fun or more moved? Perhaps the second I said. The death of Nanni Bignami was a bolt from the blue. For everyone. You die by chance – and also out of necessity, to quote Monod, which always ends.