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Her interest also focuses on the mobility of labour and capital and the effect this mobility
has on people and countries. Sassen maintains that historical frontiers have faded in favour of
those created within global cities: virtual frontiers, built with ethereal elements such as large-scale
trading and financial transactions.
Committed to her time, she does not hesitate to talk of the serious problems that globalization
has caused: growing unemployment in some areas and the ensuing creation of precarious
employment in others, emigration, impoverishment of the population, the desperate situations
encountered in so many cities, making them uninhabitable.
Saskia Sassen both alerts and advises us as to how to improve the lives of millions of people
who, day in, day out, suffer the effects of dealings not of their making and far beyond their control,
even though these activities may be taking place in their own city, in their own neighbourhood,
in these cities which have become frontier zones; cities which have, she states, a discourse we
sometimes fail to listen to, but that nonetheless is directed at us.
The US photographer Annie Leibovitz has been granted
the Award for Communication and Humanities. The art of
photographyfinds inherpersonnot onlyauniversal photographer
who has created a striking collection of portraits of the greatest
figures of our time, but also someone who has pursued her work
with the greatest intensity and utmost aesthetic sense.
The work of our Laureate is linked to the major media
in the US. Photographs we all recall and personal snapshots;
photographs of world famous celebrities and members of her
own family; everyday objects; landscapes of some indeterminate
place... all become a stunning display in Leibovitz’s photos, a sculptural image, full of beauty.
In addition to capturing the essence of the subjects in her portraits, she envelops them in a truly
special and unmistakable ambience. And she does so with a style that has created a school of its
own, revealing her own particular outlook on life, her concerns, her interests, her tastes.
Someone once wrote that film is a miracle that can be seen. In Leibovitz’s works, photography is
also like a miracle: moments captured with her camera that become eternal displays of sensitivity,
beauty and love.
The physicists Peter Higgs and François Englert and the European Organization for Nuclear
Research —cern— have received the Award for Technical and Scientific Research. We have to
go back to 1964 to understand the importance of the work undertaken by Higgs and Englert,
although their theses were not confirmed until July last year.
Peter Higgs, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Edinburgh, and François Englert,
who holds a similar Chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, worked independently during those
years, but simultaneously formulated the existence of a subatomic particle at the origin of the mass
of other particles, the so-called “Higgs boson” or “scalar boson”.
François Englert repeatedly reminds us, with generosity and humility, that he carried out his
work in the company of the late Robert Brout, whose widow accompanies us here this evening and
to whom we extend a particularly warm greeting. Back then, Englert and Peter Higgs described
the symmetry breaking mechanism in the field of quantum field theory, thus providing a key to
completing the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
These theories, analyses and data are extremely difficult to understand for the lay person. However,
we are all basically aware that they are critical in the furtherance and progress of knowledge.
When cern proved the existence of the boson last year —recreating conditions similar to the
Big Bang— we beheld the grandeur and significance of these theories and realized we had been
made privy to the greatest discovery in the history of the understanding of Nature, a discovery
which moreover confirmed current physical theories such as Einstein’s theory of relativity.
We are talking about science. We are also talking about a model international organization,
cern, constituted by 20 member states, including Spain, a fact we are very proud of. Its facilities
“The men and women of Spain have faced
adversity with great courage and have shown
a capacity for sacrifice beyond question.”
25
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