He died at 96 years old Antonino Zichichi, an Italian physicist specialized in particle physics and a central figure of Italian scientific research between the second half of the twentieth century and the first two thousand years. Born in Trapani in 1929 and graduated in physics at the University of Palermo, Zichichichi has built his international career working in some of the leading research centers in the industry, including the Fermilab of Chicago and the CERN of Geneva. From 1965 to 2006 he was an ordinary professor of physics at the University of Bologna, contributing to the formation of several generations of researchers.
Its most important institutional role was the president of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics between 1977 and 1982. In those years promoted and supported the realization of the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso, in Abruzzo: an underground infrastructure dedicated to the study of elementary particles and neutrinos, whose construction began in 1980 and ended in 1985. The laboratories are still one of the main European poles for low-energy experimental physics and are one of the scientific heritage of its work.
In addition to academic activity, Zichichi was long a popular speaker in the public debate. In particular, in the eighties and nineties he distinguished himself for his position against astrology and pseudoscientific beliefs, defending the scientific method as the only reliable tool of knowledge. In recent years, however, some of his statements had gradually isolated him from the scientific community: had questioned the role of pollution of human origin in climate change and expressed criticism of Darwinian evolution theory, positions considered exceeded and not supported by current scientific consensus.
At the same time, Zichichi had returned to the centre of media attention for extra-scientific reasons. From the end of the 2000s, a new notoriety stemmed from the imitation proposed by Maurizio Crozza, who represented him as a prolisso and abstract scientist, far from everyday reality. He was also briefly engaged in politics: in 2012 he was appointed Regional Councillor for the Cultural Heritage of Sicily by the then President Rosario Crocetta, a position he was revoked at the beginning of 2013 for political differences.
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