Carlo Rubbia

Italian nuclear physicist who, with his partner Simon van der Meer, won the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery of the massive short-lived subatomic W particle and Z particle provided another step toward proving the unification theory.

Rubbia’s interest in science developed in the years during and after World War II. The Allied armies discarded a great deal of communications equipment that he collected and used for his experiments. He received his education at the Scuola Normale in Pisa where he did his thesis on cosmic ray experiments. He earned his doctorate from the University of Pisa in 1957 and taught there for two years. He eventually moved to the United States and became a research fellow at Columbia University in an effort to gain experience with particle accelerators.

In 1960, he joined the faculty of the University of Rome, and in 1962, he became the senior physicist at the European Centre of Nuclear Research (CERN, now the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva. After he was appointed professor of physics at Harvard in 1970, the aggressive and outgoing Rubbia continued his work at CERN.