Patrizia Caraveo, astrophysicist

ABDUCTIVE THINKING

She enrolled in the Faculty of Physics to find satisfying explanations for natural phenomena: for what exists and is visible, and for what is not yet seen. This need arose in high school as a reaction to the evasive answers of her science teacher—a mental stimulus that unconsciously activated her dreaming.

 P.C.’s hunger for solutions to scientific phenomena guides and sustains her dream toward professions that address humanity’s great questions about the history of Earth and Sky—such as archaeology.

In the dream that takes her from a passion for archaeology—nurtured by the Egyptology books of her youth—to a love for astrophysics, P.C. carries with her the spirit of archaeologists, characterised by their pursuit of understanding the environment to which unearthed objects once belonged. P.C. applies this same spirit in astrophysics, seeking out cosmic objects like stars and planets to decipher their life and death.

To find satisfying scientific answers, she investigates the Universe with a mental approach rooted in abductive thinking, allowing her to infer from observable celestial remnants what may have occurred in the past.

While deductive reasoning derives specifics from general principles and inductive reasoning generalises from specific observations, abductive thinking reconstructs the unknown—what is hypothesised but not yet proven—based on concrete clues and imaginatively realistic theories.

Like an archaeologist, P.C. reconstructs the stages of life and death of a cosmic artifact.

In a sense, she is an archaeologist of the sky, because astrophysics, like archaeology, travels back in time to understand what the sky was like when the light first began its journey.

 PC directs her investigation toward the invisible, seeking to uncover what lies hidden within, guided by the pursuit of a possible elsewhere.; The cosmos, darkness, light, dark matter.  

Together with her husband, Giovanni Bignami, she observed a gamma-ray flux from the same point in the sky for two decades. It was a cosmic challenge to confirm the discovery of a pulsar—a “stellar mummy”, the remnant of a star after its death. They named it Geminga, a playful nod to the homophonic Milanese dialect expression ‘gh è minga’, which means ‘it isn’t there’.

R.S.