Tonight, I have been invited to speak about imagination, creativity, and faith from my perspective as a theoretical particle physicist and phenomenologist.

If I have to identify a word that expresses what led me to the theoretical investigation of elementary particles and their fundamental interactions, I would say the word Beauty.

It was indeed beauty that led me to science. As a teenager, I babysat for a family whose father was a physicist. One day, he said something that changed the course of my life: "A physicist is an artist who can’t draw." That simple sentence sparked something within me—it linked the world of science with a realm of creativity and imagination, like in the world of art. It held a promise of beauty and revealed a path to admire and capture that beauty in nature. When I visited the Physics Department in Milan before applying to study there, I was struck by how often the researchers used the word "beautiful" to describe their work. Their eyes shone like those of children speaking about the wonders they had uncovered. I wanted to be like them, I wanted to work in front of something capable of making my own eyes shine with awe. I believe this awe that attracted me at the beginning touches on something profoundly universal—the sense of original wonder and the sacred curiosity that springs out of it, with which humanity is hard-wired, the sacred curiosity that pushes us to constantly seek to understand the laws of Nature.

Time and again, in the course of my studies, I encountered mathematical equations—simple, elegant, and profound—that described a vast array of seemingly unrelated phenomena and that suddenly revealed a deep unity.

Consider Maxwell’s equations: four short, beautiful expressions that describe all of electromagnetic phenomena, from the light around us to the colours of a rainbow to the technology behind your mobile phones and high-speed trains. It felt like magic that all these things that seem so different are profoundly linked to one another. When I later studied these equations in the context of special relativity and saw how they connected electric and magnetic fields to the structure of space- time, my sense of awe deepened further. It was as if I glimpsed, through mathematics, an underlying harmony within creation.

In tonight’s reading from the Book of Wisdom, we hear:

“Wisdom is radiant and unfading, she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to Mae herself known to those who desire her.”

I believe that the scientific search for simple and elegant explanations of natural phenomena is part of the universal search for wisdom described in scripture. The fact that we have been given tools—mathematical structures that our minds can grasp, principles of symmetry that guide our imagination and creativity—suggests that wisdom itself is a gift, freely given out of love. It is not unreasonable to interpret such a gift as a sign pointing toward a Creator who wishes to share the keys of creation with those He made in His image.

The physics I study deals with elementary particles. Mysteriously, in the infinitesimally small, we glimpse traces of the infinitely big, down to the universe’s beginnings. The more we investigate, the more we uncover astonishing mathematical coincidences—fine-tuned conditions that make the universe stable and life possible. As Stephen Hawking, who I was so lucky to have as a colleague for four years before his passing, observed:

“What can we make of these coincidences? … Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that … is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way.”

Similarly, the renowned theoretical physicist Edward Witten has said:

“The laws of nature are very delicate. … The fact that galaxies, stars, and planets roughly like ours could have formed, and that living things roughly like us could have formed, depends on many details of the laws of physics as we currently know them being just the way they are and not being slightly different. [I think] we’ll never resolve the sense of wonder about that.”

A sense of wonder arises—before any explicit faith—when we consider the sheer improbability of our own existence. The fact that something exists rather than nothing is so unlikely, yet it is there. One of my distinguished colleagues gave a lecture on the Standard Model of particle physics titled “The Miracles of the Standard Model.” He eloquently described the extraordinary coincidences that allow the universe, and life as we know it, to exist. At the end of his four beautiful lectures he stated that his ultimate goal, however, was to prove that these "miracles" were mere accidents, products of randomness within a vast multiverse, in which our universe is just one of the many random instances of many possible ones. I asked him whether it was more scientific to believe in the multiverse or to consider that a single universe had been created with conditions precisely suited for life. He admitted that, scientifically, both hypotheses were equally valid—and that choosing between them was ultimately a matter of personal belief.

So what about faith? What does it have to do with creativity and imagination? Our daily experience tells us that a desire is sustained by the anticipation of its fulfilment. Imagination is fuelled by a present Presence. The Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître, father of the Big Bang theory, said:

“Science does not prove or disprove the existence of God. But the believer has the advantage of knowing that the enigma has a solution, that the underlying logic is ultimately the work of an intelligent being, that, therefore, the problem posed by nature was posed to be solved […]. This knowledge […] will help them maintain the healthy optimism without which a sustained effort cannot long endure.”

Faith is thus at the origin of a certain optimism that makes us keep trying, keep searching in front of the countless questions that keep arising when we think we understand something. As one of the greatest particle physics theorist Richard Feynman said:

“With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still […] turning over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries — certainly a grand adventure.”

And if I may add something, I find it profoundly moving that the God I believe in— the one who created all things and entered history 2000 year ago as a human being—has given my colleague the intellectual tools to argue against His existence. This moves me because the God I came to know is a lover of freedom. He could but did not want to impose Himself through the laws of nature, for if He did, He would not be the God of love I have come to know. As it is written in Acts: “He made men that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after Him and find Him. Yet He is not far from each one of us, for ‘in Him we live and move and have our being.’” (Acts 17:27-28)

I will conclude with the words of St. Paul that we heard earlier.

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord..” (Colossians 3:16-17)

Whenever I enter the Cavendish Laboratory, I walk under an inscription from Psalm 111 that resound with Paul’s words.

"The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.”

And I feel like I am participating in the song of human hearts to the Lord that the founders of the laboratory shared in, so much so that they wanted to write it at the entrance of the building. They were aware that all creativity flows from God, as water from a spring.

If we live even a glimpse of what we shared today, our humanity would be inexorably filled by a sense of humility. Prayer would spring from the consciousness of the wonders of creation, an entreaty that the work of our imagination and creativity as scientists may be part of God’s continuous creation act. This entreaty in a sense purifies scientists’ work of any vain search for personal glory, and makes it instead oriented to seek wisdom, in which human hearts finds true joy and in which God’s glory shines. Amen.