Word: cern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...researching his book, Taubes, who has a physics degree from Harvard and is a frequent contributor to DISCOVER magazine, talked with more than a hundred current and former Rubbia colleagues. Most of his interviews took place at Geneva's CERN laboratory, where, Taubes says, Rubbia almost single- handedly persuaded the directors to build the super proton synchrotron (SPS) accelerator used to discover the W and Z particles...
Some of Taubes' allegations: in 1964, at a CERN seminar, Rubbia presented experimental results that two of his co-experimenters claim did not exist. "We were looking for an effect that we didn't find," explained Rubbia's colleague. "And yet Carlo gave a seminar. I don't know where he got the numbers from. I guess he must have invented them." Those numbers were never < published. In the early 1970s, Rubbia championed a conclusion erroneously drawn from an experiment to measure the probability of particle collisions in an accelerator. Other CERN researchers arrived at a contrary conclusion. But Rubbia...
...leading contenders were Rubbia and his colleagues, who had built a $20 million particle detector called UA1 to be used with the SPS accelerator, and a second team of physicists at CERN using a detector known as UA2. Rubbia drove the UA1 team unmercifully, Taubes writes, then unofficially spread the news of a discovery before performing the sort of rigorous analysis that would confirm it. This maneuver would effectively pre-empt any claim by the UA2 group, which was proceeding with a more careful proof before going public. Says Physicist Bernard Sadoulet, a member of the UA1 team...
Those traces have helped physicists to track down more and more members of the large and seemingly limitless bestiary of subatomic particles. Last year, for example, Rubbia shared a Nobel Prize for having discovered, using the CERN super proton-antiproton synchrotron accelerator (SPPS), the W and Z particles. His finding provided proof for a theory that united two of the fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the weak force...
...payoff from the SSC should be even greater. As it is now conceived, the accelerator would generate energies of 40 trillion electron volts, in contrast to the 640 billion electron volts produced by CERN's SPPS accelerator. More impressive still, it would produce collisions 20 times as powerful as the generation of big machines now under construction at CERN, Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Whizzing past each other, the SSC's two opposing beams, consisting of closely packed bunches of about 10 billion protons each, would complete about 3,000 laps a second. In four to six places...