Carlo Rubbia Quotations

I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher.

I have to be where the best work can be done.

Soon after my degree, in 1958 I went to the United States to enlarge my experience and to familiarize myself with particle accelerators. I spent about one and a half years at Columbia University.

High-energy collisions have led to the observation of many hundreds of new hadronic particle states. These new particles, which are generally unstable, appear to be just as fundamental as the neutron and the proton.

Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.

I'm stubborn; I know what I want. I'll dedicate all my efforts to achieving it.

Quark-antiquark collisions cannot be realized directly since free quarks are not available. The closest substitute is to use collisions between protons and antiprotons.

As a boy, I was deeply interested in scientific ideas, electrical and mechanical, and I read almost everything I could find on the subject. I was attracted more by the hardware and construction aspects than by the scientific issues.

We have to be aware that fossil fuel energy sources have an expiry date. A timeframe of 30, 40 or 50 years can seem a long time to get rewards for economic policy, but it's only a short time for implementing a new energy policy.

Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.