Ten Nobels for the future

Carlo Rubbia was born in Gorizia (Italy) in 1934. After receiving a degree in physics from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, he moved to Columbia University in the United States, where he spent about a year and a half performing the first of a long series of experiments in the field of weak interactions. In 1970 he became Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University, teaching one semester a year until December 1988. From January 1989 to December 1993, Rubbia has been Director-General of CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, having worked there as a Senior Physicist since 1961.

In November 1993 he proposed the concept of an Energy Amplifier, a novel and safe way of producing nuclear energy exploiting present day accelerator technologies. Since January 1994, with a small group of collaborators at CERN, he is devoting all his time and energies to checking and implementing this socially crucial concept.

His most important work has been carried out at various particle accelerators in the United States (Fermilab in Illinois and the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island) and CERN. The revolutionary techniques developed with Simon van der Meer for creating antiprotons, confining them in a concentrated beam and colliding them with a proton beam at extremely high energy levels won them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1984. The techniques allowed the UA1 Collaboration, an international team of more than 100 physicists headed by Rubbia at CERN, to discover the intermediate vector bosons, a triplet of particles that carry the weak force underlying radioactive decay in the atomic nucleus, which had become a cornerstone of modern theories of elementary particle physics long before being experimentally observed.

Rubbia has also made a decisive contribution to ICARUS, an international collaborative effort based at the Gran Sasso Laboratory designed to demonstrate signs of proton decay and detect the neutrinos emitted from the Sun.

1993
The Role of Science
in the 90s

1996
Energy:
The Necessary "Evil"?