RUBBIA, CARLO

(1934– )

A scientist from Gorizia, on the border with Slovenia, Carlo Rubbia won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984. Agraduate of the elite Scuola Normale di Pisa (although he was unsuccessful in his original application and was admitted only after another student dropped out), Rubbia has done most of his scientific research abroad; indeed, he has been publicly very critical of the Italian state’s support for young scientists. He began his work on the structure of “weak interactions” at Columbia University, and his main scientific research has been done at Harvard University, where he was professor between 1971 and 1988, and at the Conseil Europeen pour la Recerche Nucleare/European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva (Switzerland).

As Rubbia’s Nobel autobiography states, at CERN in the early 1980s he suggested “transforming an existing high energy accelerator into a colliding beam device in which a beam of protons and of antiprotons, their antimatter twins, [were] counter-rotating and colliding head on.” The result of this insight was the discovery of Wand Z particles. Rubbia and his collaborator, Simon van der Meer, shared the Nobel Prize just two years after these discoveries, one of the quickest-ever awards of the prize. Rubbia was director-general of CERN from 1989 to 1993, and in 1994 he became director of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, near his hometown of Gorizia. He was director of the Ente per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e l’Ambiente (ENEA), the Italian state entity for the development of new technologies and for environmental science, between 1999 and 2005. This appointment terminated in July 2005 when Rubbia made his most devastating critique to date of political interference in the management of Italian science.