RUBBIA'S PRIZE NO SURPRISE,
COLLEAGUES AT HARVARD SAY
Author: By Paul Duke Jr., Special to The Globe
Date: Thursday, October 18, 1984
Page: 8
Section: METRO
"Other expeditions saw the tracks," said Dr. George Brandenburg yesterday of
the Nobel Prize-winning work of his Harvard University colleague, Carlo
Rubbia. "This one found the skeletons."
Rubbia is a physics professor at Harvard, where he teaches when not at
CERN, the European nuclear research facility. His Harvard colleagues applauded
the award yesterday, calling Rubbia's work some of the most important ever
attempted in physics. They also said that the prize was not a surprise.
"This discovery was so dramatic it was hard to believe he wouldn't get the
prize," said Prof. Sheldon Glashow, chairman of physics department.
Other colleagues called Rubbia a "visionary" and "audacious," a scientist
who has "more ideas in a year than most physicists have in a productive
lifetime."
"We're very proud of him," said Glashow, one of three who shared the 1979
Nobel Prize for physics. "He is an ebullient, flamboyant go-getter, perhaps
the only scientist in the world with the drive to push something like this
through."
Brandenburg, director of Harvard's High Energy Physics Laboratory, said
cowinner Simon van der Meer, "a quiet, unassuming superb technical physicist,"
and the more aggressive, outgoing Rubbia had made a complementary scientific
team.
Lawrence Sulak, a professor at the University of Michigan and currently a
visiting professor of physics at Harvard, compared Rubbia's scientific drive
in overcoming the skepticism of colleagues to that of the Wright Brothers.
Sulak recalled that a prestigious physics journal, Physical Review Letters,
had refused in 1976 to print an article Rubbia wrote with two colleagues that
proposed the idea of the device used in the crucial experiments.
"There were some symposia where Carlo would suggest this and people would
actually snicker," said Sulak. "You have to realize that there's a lot of
money and time invested in a project like this. It's a hard business in which
to be a visionary."
Rubbia, an Italian citizen, was born in 1934 in Gorizia, Italy, where he
developed an interest in science during and after World War II by collecting
communications equipment discarded by Allied armies sweeping through Italy. He
earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Pisa in Italy, and came to
the United States in 1958 as a research fellow at Columbia University in New
York. In 1960 he joined CERN.
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