On the Women in Physics Lecture tour
This August, I was honored to make my first visit to Australia as the winner of the 2016 Women in Physics International Award of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP). I gave a series of lectures across Australia, holding about 30 seminars and conferences in a number of universities, research centers, colleges and public sites. The series started in Tasmania and moved to Sydney (where I lectured at the astronomical observatory), the Wollongong Science Centre, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra and Melbourne. A real tour de force which was possible only due to the support from the AIP colleagues who organized the tour in the best way.

While lecturing across Australia I met children as young as six, but I also met with interested audiences of all ages, including some poets that took part in my conferences. I talked about stars, black holes, quantum mechanics and about my research activities at the DAFNE collider in Frascati (LNF-INFN) and at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory, including my FQXi financed project about testing collapse models of quantum theory. (You can read more about what collapse models are and my research in my FQXi Q&A.)
One of the goals of the tour was lecturing about science to girls and encouraging them to pursue a career in science--a goal which was achieved, considering the girls' overwhelming enthusiasm and participation in the meetings. One of the most successful activities was the Girls in Physics Breakfast, which involved--despite the early start at 7 am--more than 100 girls from 20 different Melbourne colleges. They asked so many questions about my life and about "what it is like to be a scientist."
Maybe the most interesting question during the tour was asked to me by an enthusiast 8 years old boy--he wanted to know "How big is space?"
I met so many girls and boys wishing to study science; looking into their eyes I saw a universe of beautiful possibilities, I saw the future.
I also visited wonderful laboratories in universities and science centres in the towns I visited and discussed with Australian colleagues about physics, research activities and possibilities to collaborate in the near future both on technological developments (detector systems and their possible use in fundamental science and applications) and new experiments at the underground laboratory near Melbourne in construction. Why not to test the collapse models in the Southern Hemisphere as well?
I also understood what makes Australia such a wonderful country: people with different cultural backgrounds, coming from all places in the world, all of them proud to be Australians! I believe that we, the rest of the world, can only learn the lesson Australia teaches us!
I didn't have the chance to meet many koalas or kangaroos, but I met a lot of enthusiastic people, who love science and consider it a fundamental resource for our society.
Still a connection was established between koalas and...quantum mechanics: in a girls' college in Melbourne, where I was lecturing about the Schroedinger's cat paradox and future quantum technologies, I had the surprise to receive from the girls, after my presentation, a very nice little box. Opening it I found a koala toy--the girls told me they wanted to use the koala instead of the cat to express the "measurement problem" which they had studied to prepare for our discussions.