14 Facts About Nicola Cabibbo

Nicola Cabibbo was an Italian physicist best known for his work on the weak interaction, particularly his introduction of the Cabibbo angle.

Nicola Cabibbo was born on 10 April 1935 in Rome, Italy to Silician parents; his father, Emanuele, was a lawyer and his mother was a housewife.

Nicola Cabibbo was interested in mathematics, physics and astronomy from an early age, and built his own radios.

Nicola Cabibbo enrolled at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1952 and graduated with a degree in physics in 1958.

In 1963, while working at CERN, Nicola Cabibbo found the solution to the puzzle of the weak decays of strange particles, formulating what came to be known as Nicola Cabibbo universality.

In 1967 Nicola Cabibbo settled back in Rome where he taught theoretical physics and created a large school.

Nicola Cabibbo was president of the INFN from 1983 to 1992, during which time the Gran Sasso Laboratory was inaugurated.

Nicola Cabibbo was president of the Italian energy agency, ENEA, from 1993 to 1998, and was president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1993 until his death.

Nicola Cabibbo addressed these issues, following Murray Gell-Mann and Maurice Levy, by postulating weak universality, which involves a similarity in the weak interaction coupling strength between different generations of particles.

Later, Nicola Cabibbo researched applications of supercomputers to address problems in modern physics with the experiments APE 100 and APE 1000.

Nicola Cabibbo supported attempts to rehabilitate executed Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, citing the apologies on Galileo Galilei as a possible model to correct the historical wrongs done by the Church.

In 1962, Nicola Cabibbo married Paola Iandolo, who became a professor of North American literature at the University of Salerno and then of American Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome.

Nicola Cabibbo died on August 16,2010 at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Rome, at the age of 75, after having been admitted for a respiratory failure.

Nicola Cabibbo had been suffering from a tumour for several years.