Robin McKie
THERE are few more colourful characters in science today than the flamboyant, cigar- smoking Italian Carlo Rubbia – a Nobel laureate and human dynamo, Committed, brilliant and famously touchy, his personality has dominated the study of fundamental physics for decades. Think of him as the Pavarotti of particle physics.
At the age of 63, he remains one of the most powerful scientists in Cern, which – thanks in part to his efforts – has become the world’s leading particle physics research centre, a laboratory so big it is now a sprawling suburb of Geneva in its own right.
The son of a telephone engineer and a primary school teacher, Rubbia spent much of his early childhood ill in bed after contracting tuberculosis at the age of six. Later the family moved to Venice, where Rubbia studied at a school specialising in science. He won a scholarship to the Scuola Normale university in Pisa, where he augmented his meagre grant by becoming a successful poker player.
After graduation, Rubbia joined Cern as a researcher before going to Harvard, where he developed a reputation for his competitive, daring science (and outbursts of temper).
In the Eighties, Rubbia returned to Cern and began a collaboration with Dutch scientist Simon van der Meer. They persuaded Cern officials to transform their mightiest particle machine, the Super Proton Synchroton – which was halfway through construction – so that it could carry out experiments of their design.
It was a master stroke, for in 1983 the first of these experiments uncovered the fabled Z and W intermediate vector bosons, the particulate Holy Grails of physics, earning the two researchers the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics
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