Carlo Rubbia (born 31 March 1934) is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. Early life and education Rubbia was born in 1934 in Gorizia, an Italian town on the border with Slovenia. His family moved to Venice then Udine because of wartime disruption. His father was an electrical engineer and encouraged him to study the same, though he stated his wish to study physics. In the local countryside, he collected and experimented with abandoned military communications equipment. After taking an entrance exam for the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa to study physics, he failed to get into the required top ten (coming eleventh), so began an engineering course in Milan in 1953. Soon after, a Pisa student dropped out, presenting Rubbia with his opportunity. He gained a degree and doctorate in a relatively short time with a thesis on cosmic ray experimentation; his adviser was Marcello Conversi. At Pisa, he met his future wife, Marisa, also a Physics student. Career and research Columbia University Following his degree, he went to the United States to do postdoctoral research, where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University performing experiments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons. This was the first of a long series of experiments that Rubbia has performed in the field of weak interactions and which culminated in the Nobel Prize-winning work at CERN. CERN He moved back to Europe for a placement at the University of Rome before joining the newly founded CERN in 1960, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the Intersecting Storage Rings, using counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other. Rubbia and his collaborators conducted experiments there, again studying the weak force. The main results in this field were the observation of the structure in the elastic scattering process and the first observation of the charmed baryons. These experiments were crucial in order to perfect the techniques needed later for the discovery of more exotic particles in a different type of particle collider. In 1976, he suggested adapting CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) to collide protons and antiprotons in the same ring – the Proton-Antiproton Collider. Using