Word: rubbia
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Harvard Nobel physicist Carlo Rubbia threatened to resign earlier this month after his colleague and fellow Nobel Laureate Sheldon L. Glashow praised a controversial book which criticizes him, a source close to Rubbia said yesterday...
...Time magazine article earlier this month, Glashow, Higgins Professor of Physics, was quoted defending a book that charged Rubbia with employing Machiavellian tactics in his successful attempt to win the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics...
...source said that in response to Glashow's remarks, Rubbia, who won the Nobel for discovering the W and Z particles, wrote a letter to the Physics Department chairman threatening to leave Harvard, the source said...
...Rubbia's triumph, says Taubes, did not change his tactics. In 1984 the physicist announced evidence that seemed to suggest two more discoveries. The first was that of the top quark, a basic building block of matter that is predicted by theory but that other scientists believe still remains undiscovered. In the second, his team's experiments picked up the signs of what would become known as monojets; Rubbia boldly theorized that the monojets might signal a hitherto undetected particle. If so, Rubbia would have his second Nobel-class discovery within two years. A discovery of this importance...
...short, Taubes implies, Rubbia is unethical and an opportunist. But does that simply reflect the pressures of high-energy physics? Says Sadoulet: "In this field, unfortunately, only people who are s.o.b.s are making an impact, because it's such a competitive field. But I am not one to throw stones at Rubbia. We fought a lot, but what's important is that a competent team made an important discovery." Taubes does not disagree. "Rubbia is a very smart man," he told TIME. "In a field in which the ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and win over governments...