Morchio’s Axe

There are two anecdotes that I would like to add to what was said at Gianni’s funeral and to the tribute paid to him back then, as on that occasion I didn’t feel like sharing them, in order to avoid further emotion. As at the physics department my office was in the same corridor as Gianni’s, I happened to speak to him multiple times, and yet I had always had some sort of restraint for possible joint scientific collaborations. It seemed to me that he knew everything and that he was way better than me!—even if I did appreciate the concreteness with which he didn’t disdain to make numerical estimates, if necessary. However, some time earlier I was contacted by a layman who, as typical, thought he was revolutionising physics and was looking for someone from the academy willing to listen to him. Naturally, I accepted to talk to that folk, and to my surprise I discovered that the only other person in the department who had offered to do so was Gianni. So I dropped my previous reserve, and Gianni and I eventually started talking about physics. This way we discovered that we were two iconoclasts—the both of us, albeit in different ways: he, because he thought nothing was rigorous enough; I, because I reckoned that nothing was derived along a simply enough path. This common attitude lead us to deal with General Relativity. I think we were both very proud of the result of this collaboration because it showed that results of General Relativity could be obtained in a much simpler way in another metric (Painleve–Gullstrand), using essentially only Special Relativity.