How To Win a Nobel Prize

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Popular mythology has often portrayed scientists as selfless seekers after ultimate truths about the universe. In fact, like ordinary mortals, some researchers are driven as much by ambition and ego gratification as by intellectual curiosity. As the stakes get higher -- especially when the chance of a Nobel Prize looms -- that drive sometimes manifests itself in unseemly behavior.

A newly published book may further tarnish the image of the loftily motivated scientist. Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment (Random House) provides a rare inside look at particle physics, a field increasingly dependent on huge and expensive machines -- and on scientists who are as adept at fund raising and politicking as they are at probing the subatomic world. Author Gary Taubes provides that view while chronicling the research that won Italian Physicist Carlo Rubbia a share of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the W and Z particles, which transmit the so- called weak nuclear force.

Taubes acknowledges Rubbia's brilliance. But he argues that the physicist's distinguished career has been marred by manipulation, bullying and corner cutting. Taubes told TIME that in his opinion Rubbia "has made more mistakes than any major physicist of his era. He has a history of distorting and exaggerating his experimental results." Says Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow, a Harvard colleague of Rubbia's: "The book is a fair picture. I would make it required reading for anyone who wants to go into this field."

Rubbia, when confronted with charges made in the book, countered that Taubes "has not grasped the mechanisms of discovery processes in large-scale, collaborative science." He insisted that the author does not understand the give-and-take that normally occurs between members of large scientific teams prior to the formal publication of their results.

In researching his book, Taubes, who has a physics degree from Harvard and is a frequent contributor to DISCOVER magazine, talked with more than a hundred current and former Rubbia colleagues. Most of his interviews took place at Geneva's CERN laboratory, where, Taubes says, Rubbia almost single- handedly persuaded the directors to build the super proton synchrotron (SPS) accelerator used to discover the W and Z particles.

Some of Taubes' allegations: in 1964, at a CERN seminar, Rubbia presented experimental results that two of his co-experimenters claim did not exist. "We were looking for an effect that we didn't find," explained Rubbia's colleague. "And yet Carlo gave a seminar. I don't know where he got the numbers from. I guess he must have invented them." Those numbers were never < published. In the early 1970s, Rubbia championed a conclusion erroneously drawn from an experiment to measure the probability of particle collisions in an accelerator. Other CERN researchers arrived at a contrary conclusion. But Rubbia, convinced he was right, opposed publication of their work. The competition turned out to be correct. In the mid-1970s, Rubbia collaborated with two Americans in an experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, on interactions of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and drew an interpretation that the team's underlings considered dubious. Rubbia publicly hailed the work as an important breakthrough; others later proved him wrong.

Even the highlight of Rubbia's career -- the discovery of the W and Z -- was accompanied by political machinations, says Taubes. Until late 1982 these subatomic particles were known only in theory -- the electroweak theory, which won Nobel Prizes in 1979 for Glashow and two fellow physicists. But someone still had to find concrete proof that the particles existed.

The leading contenders were Rubbia and his colleagues, who had built a $20 million particle detector called UA1 to be used with the SPS accelerator, and a second team of physicists at CERN using a detector known as UA2. Rubbia drove the UA1 team unmercifully, Taubes writes, then unofficially spread the news of a discovery before performing the sort of rigorous analysis that would confirm it. This maneuver would effectively pre-empt any claim by the UA2 group, which was proceeding with a more careful proof before going public. Says Physicist Bernard Sadoulet, a member of the UA1 team: "It was clear that we were working on something so central to particle physics that if we got it, our leader would get the Nobel Prize."

Rubbia's triumph, says Taubes, did not change his tactics. In 1984 the physicist announced evidence that seemed to suggest two more discoveries. The first was that of the top quark, a basic building block of matter that is predicted by theory but that other scientists believe still remains undiscovered. In the second, his team's experiments picked up the signs of what would become known as monojets; Rubbia boldly theorized that the monojets might signal a hitherto undetected particle. If so, Rubbia would have his second Nobel-class discovery within two years. A discovery of this importance was so tempting, according to Taubes, that Rubbia wrote a paper on the apparent finding, rushed it to the journal Physics Letters before more than a ; small fraction of his team members could evaluate it, and gave the news to the press. Further analysis, some of it by Rubbia's own colleagues, showed that he had no basis for his contention.

In short, Taubes implies, Rubbia is unethical and an opportunist. But does that simply reflect the pressures of high-energy physics? Says Sadoulet: "In this field, unfortunately, only people who are s.o.b.s are making an impact, because it's such a competitive field. But I am not one to throw stones at Rubbia. We fought a lot, but what's important is that a competent team made an important discovery." Taubes does not disagree. "Rubbia is a very smart man," he told TIME. "In a field in which the ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and win over governments has become at least as important as doing a rigorous analysis, he thoroughly deserved the Nobel."