Simon van der Meer

Simon van der Meer was born in the Netherlands on 24 November 1925 and became a particle accelerator physicist. Working at CERN, he developed methods that made it possible to detect the W and Z particles — the fundamental communicators of the weak interaction, the force behind radioactive decay. The breakthrough required not just building bigger machines but inventing entirely new ways to control particle beams with enough precision to make collisions that would reveal these elusive messengers. In 1984 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the project that…