van der Meer, Simon

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Simon van der Meer, 1925–2011, Dutch physical engineer. He spent nearly his entire career at CERN, where he did his most important work with Carlo Rubbia. They discovered the W and Z particles, which convey the weak force, one of nature's four fundamental forces (see weak interactions); he employed stochastic cooling to create the high-energy beams of antiprotons that were used in the proton-antiproton collisions that led to the particles' discovery. For their work, van der Meer and Rubbia were awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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