During his stay at Cornell, Cocconi and his wife performed many experiments there and in Echo Lake located in the Rocky Mountains, where they demonstrated the galactic and extragalactic origins of cosmic rays.

[2] While at Cornell he also wrote, with Philip Morrison, his most famous paper "Searching for Interstellar Communications", on the 21 cm Hydrogen line, which turned out to be of vital importance in the SETI program.

[1] In 1963 he returned at CERN, and discovered with Alan Wetherell, Bert Diddens, and others, that the diffraction peak in proton-proton scattering shrunk with the increase in collision energy.

[1] Then with a group led by Klaus Winter, he formed the CHARM collaboration, which worked until the 1980s, which investigated elastic electron-neutrino scattering.

His refusal of association with academies, and his lack of interest in prizes and honours, as well as his wish not to talk publicly, after his retirement, of his scientific life, are well known.