There are very few Spanish scientists with a relevant level worldwide, very few.
I would say none.
With a really high level,
there is none. We are a few who have a certain level.
We are well-known, etc,etc.
But a work from a Spanish scientist
from Cajal, Cajal without doubt.
But anyway, in the last fifty years,
a bit of Ochoa, who wasn't Spanish but American.
He was born in Spain but he worked in the United States and when they
asked him
he said that he was American, that he felt American. But anyway,
there aren't.
And there aren't because Spain have had very little interest in science.
They have paid very little attention to it.
Before the Civil War
it had figures like del Río Ortega, who was a frontline biologist.
In physics it had Catalán, who trained himself before the Civil War.
Also Blas Cabrera,
who was a very competent physicist, and was able to found a school. He founded
a school
with a very high level.
There were chemists of a very high level.
There were engineers
like Torres Quevedo
who has made important contributions to computer science. I met him
during the years I worked as a scientific consultant of IBM,
who also knew
Torres Quevedo.
All the people of a high level
disappeared in Spain during the Civil War.
Even if they were not leftist. I don't think that Blas Cabera was leftist,
but they disappeared because they were the important people and they had
important positions. For example, my father-in-low.
He was the Director of the School of Telecommunications.
He was sent to prison.
'He was leftist.' He wasn't leftist! He was a normal person
and he was director because he had been in Germany because he was renowned and therefore he went
to prison for some months.
Then he was fired and then he was reinstated.
But everything he could have done between
1939 and 1956
then remained undone.
And that means that when I started studying physics in the 50s
there was no science in Spain. The science that we had in Spain was that
of the
19th, mid-19th century.
Spanish science did not exist before the 70s.
Therefore, we have to
take into account tradition, and we are creating the tradition right now.
We will have to see in thirty years.
Particle physics tries to examine what the matter that surround us
is made of,
in the most elementary level possible.
And to see what the matter is made of, then we have to break it down into smaller
and smaller pieces.
And as those pieces are each time more strongly linked,
to break them down we need higher energies.
That is why high energies are used and why it is called high energy
physics.
And what is really curious, actually one of the most curious
things we have discovered in this past century
is that all matter is formed by three elementary particles.
It could have been otherwise, it could have been
ninety types of elementary particles. There may not have been types of
elementary particles, but it turns out that everything is formed
by three different types of particles that are called electrons, neutrinos
and quarks.
And the physics that I make consists of , first discovering this,
and then discovering how these elementary particles interact among
them.
Matter is formed by
protons, and protons are also formed by quarks
and the matter is believed to be stable
but it could be that it disintegrated.
And if the matter disintegrated,
in pure energy,
then I think this would be something very important.
I did a work on this, one of the first ones,
but unfortunately the matter didn't want to disintegrate.
And then when they did the experiments
huge experiments with thousands of tons of detectors
and so on, it turned out that the matter didn't disintegrate.
Thus, this work
that at one stage everyone quoted, then everybody stopped quoting it,
and it stopped being interesting.
But I still think that it is a very interesting work
because
one cannot always be right.
There are some people, like unfortunately many of the politicians in our country,
who believe that the country is not interested in science.
I think this is false.
But we scientists tend to believe that the country is very interested in science, and this is also
false.
I think it is a matter of fashion.
Suddenly something becomes fashionable in science,
recently cloning and genome,
and people are very curious about
cloning and genome.
And then it will stop being fashionable, and something else will become trendy, and people
will change.
But I believe that there is an interest in science.
And I think that we, as scientists, have the duty,
not so much of making science, but undoubtedly important
of trying to approach the audience, let say the external world.
Get out from the ivory tower
and get closer to the external world.