Word: cern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hearing before a House subcommittee, physicists from the U.S. and Europe last week stressed the importance of the mammoth project for American science. "By building the SSC you will have predominance in this particular field," said Carlo Rubbia, a renowned physicist at the CERN accelerator center near Geneva. His testimony supported the view of Presidential Science Adviser George Keyworth, who earlier this year warned that "it would be a serious blow to U.S. scientific leadership if that facility were built in another country...
...Rubbia was in a Milan cab, en route to Linate Airport last week and worrying about a possible Italian air-traffic controllers' strike. Suddenly the pop music on the taxi's radio was interrupted by a news bulletin: Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, his colleague at CERN, the great European nuclear research complex, had been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. At first the taxi driver did not believe his passenger's excited claims to be the man in the news. "But when I convinced him," Rubbia recalls, "he offered me a free ride...
That the physicist learned of his prize in transit was fitting. Known among his friends as "the Alitalia scientist," Rubbia, 50, frequently flies from CERN, located outside Geneva where he does his research, to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where he teaches physics. His relentless energy and aggressive pursuit of ideas are what led to his discovery of three critical subatomic particles, ending a 20-year hunt that involved hundreds of scientists...
...CERN's fourmile, $400 million super proton synchrotron, Rubbia devised a method of creating supercollisions among subatomic particles that would, he predicted, produce the carriers of the weak force...
...first nobody believed his proposal, particularly since it would require the conversion of the synchrotron into a particle collider, at a cost of $55 million. Rubbia's notions, however, had one staunch supporter: Simon van der Meer, a senior engineer at CERN. Van der Meer designed a device critical to the taming of the colliding beams in Rubbia's experiment. In 1979 CERN gave Rubbia and Van der Meer a go-ahead for their project, and by 1983 the three particles had been found...