After taking an entrance exam for the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa to study physics, he failed to get into the required top ten (coming eleventh), so began an engineering course in Milan in 1953.

[9][10] [11][12][13] Following his degree, he went to the United States to do postdoctoral research,[1] where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University[14] performing experiments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons.

He moved back to Europe for a placement at the University of Rome before joining the newly founded CERN in 1960, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions.

In 1984 Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Nobel Prize "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction".

Van den Meer had in the meantime developed the concept of "stochastic cooling", in which particles, like anti-protons, could be kept in a circular array, and their beam divergence reduced progressively by sending signals to bending magnets downstream.

Since decreasing the divergence of the beam meant to reduce transverse velocity or energy components, the suggestive term "stochastic cooling" was given to the scheme.

Simon van de Meer developed and tested the technology in the proton Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, but it is most effective on rather low-intensity beams, such as the anti-protons which were prepared for use in the SPS when configured as a collider.

The most widely accepted version of the unified field theories predicts that protons do not last forever, but gradually decay into energy after an average lifetime of at least 1032 years.

[17] Rubbia was principal Scientific Adviser of CIEMAT (Spain), a member of the high-level Advisory Group on global warming set up by EU's President Barroso in 2007 and of the board of trustees at the IMDEA Energy Institute.

In 2009–2010, he was Special Adviser for Energy to the Secretary General of ECLAC, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, based in Santiago (Chile).

During his term as President of ENEA (1999–2005) he promoted a novel method for concentrating solar power at high temperatures for energy production, known as the Archimede Project, which is being developed by industry for commercial use.