Simon Van der Meer

Simon Van der Meer, born in 1925, Dutch physicist and co-winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for physics for his contributions to the discovery of several subatomic particles whose existence had been predicted but not confirmed. This discovery added further evidence to the theory proposed by Albert Einstein that all forces in nature are related and helped explain the nuclear reactions that occur in the sun. Van der Meer shared the Nobel Prize with his colleague Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia.

Born in The Hague, the Netherlands, Van der Meer obtained an engineering degree in 1952 from the Technische Hogeschool in Delft. After working for several years in the electronics industry, he joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where he spent most of his career.

Since the 1950s, theoretical physicists have searched for evidence to support Einstein's unification theory, in which all of nature's forces (such as magnetism and gravity) are related. One piece of necessary evidence is the existence of W and Z field particles. W and Z particles are about 100 times heavier than the proton, which is found in the atomic nucleus. The existence of these particles had been predicted but never confirmed. In an experiment designed by Rubbia, researchers hoped to observe W particles, with a positive or negative charge, and Z particles by colliding a beam of protons with a beam of antiprotons (protons with a negative charge). These particles convey the “weak force,” a force that causes certain particles to decay, or transform into other particles. Van der Meer's most significant contribution to this effort was developing a way to create the concentrated beam of protons and antiprotons essential for the experiment. Van der Meer built a device that could generate and store antiprotons, an especially difficult task. In January of 1983 a team of more than 100 physicists confirmed for the first time the existence of W and Z particles.