He was born in Venice on 31 March 1934, he graduates in Physics at the Normale in Pisa, but soon after he emigrates to the United States, at the Columbia University in New York, the science elite of the time (1958). When he is getting used to the new working environment he hears of a project of building an International Centre of science in Europe, in Geneva. He comes back in 1960 and  makes new experiments on decay and nuclear capture of mesons μ or muons., already observed at the Cyclotron in Nevis.

The success obtained shows the technological limits of the instruments used, Rubbia suggests (1976) the idea of an accelerator in which the particles proton-anti proton are not shot on a target but collide frontally thus increasing the energy of the collision. The CERN of Geneva accepts this proposal and converts its Synchrotron in a Super Synchrotron collider, capable of developing 270 Gev.

 Some  theoretical physicists such as Weinberg, Salam and Glashow had been working on a unified theory on weak electromagnetic interactions; Rubbia works to test experimentally this theory, using the new Collider. In the meantime he obtains the chair of Physics in Harvard(1970-1988). When they ask him if the weekly journey Geneva-New York-Geneva is tiring  he answers” Yes, definitely, but when you make pure research you must have the academic virus in your body, or you would be working at IBM and earning four times as well “.

In the 4 days he was staying in Geneva, Rubbia, together with an international group of physicists of CERN tried to solve the most difficult problems that aroused from the daily production of anti matter. The most difficult point was to gather together the beams of particles and obtain two beams colliding but not cancelling out each other. Simon Van der Meer solves this problem devising a cooling stochastic process able to concentrate beams of particles. When tested the particles don’t cancel and keep on turning. Next discovery (1983) of bosoms W(positive and negative) and of neutral bosom (Zeta zero), is the natural consequence of the first success. The Nobel prize is conferred  to Rubbia and to his colleague Van der Meer the following year.(1984). At the time the tireless professor is already devising the building of  a Big Collider of electrons and positrons, the LEP, a ring of 27 km of circumference, bored underground between France and Switzerland, that will be officially launched in 1989. Since December 1989 Carlo Rubbia will be General Director of CERN for the following five years.

Then he promotes in Trieste the project “ Light of Sincrotone” that will provide Italy with one of the most sophisticate  technological machines that contributes in a crucial way to the activity of the laboratory of the Gran Sasso, dedicated to the decay of proton: The experiment “Icarus” will try to detect  the signal of the neutrins emitted by the sun like a simple telescope of neutrins. Meanwhile the event of Chernobyl has shocked people and aroused doubts around nuclear research. Also Rubbia is distressed and will show his anxiety in the book  “The nuclear dilemma” (Sperling& Kupfer, Milan,1987). Therefore at the National Conference of Energy in Rome  he presents an experiment to produce energy from fusion, the source of clean energy that could solve man’s problems in 2000. It is a reactor inertially confined that uses beams of collision at high energy to implode the microscopic balls of deuterium and tritium.

The most important results on fission experimented all over the world have been obtained by JET, at Culham, England. At the end of 1991 Carlo Rubbia has been given the o.k to the project LHC( Large Hadron Collider), the new super accelerator to develop power or millions of  electron volts. According to the policy of Chinese boxes, LHC has been inserted into the same tunnel of LEP to improve the performances and the voltage to let Europe earn time and money, before the Americans that still have to build  their SSC.

 Rubbia’s attention is not only focused to machinery but also to men. Impressed by the Diaspora of ex -soviet scientists, he is trying to stop the waste of scientific and cultural heritage of ex. Soviet Union. To keep  five thousand scientists in their country he proposed to President Mitterand an International Foundation, whose annual budget was about one hundred million dollars. But his fervour and dynamism have not cancelled his doubts about population increase and the future developments of genetic engineering, Rubbia says: ”However science can be rich in ideas and solutions  it will never be able to compete with exponential growth of population” and he recommends to his friends biologists:” Don’t make the same mistake we did at the time of the thermonuclear bomb, don’t clear the way to old mistakes”.