![Simon van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia celebrate their award of the Nobel Prize in 1984 with a toast at CERN.](https://cern70.cern/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/8410523.jpg)
Only a year after the discovery of the W and Z bosons, the two key scientists behind it receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. Carlo Rubbia, the instigator of the SPS accelerator’s conversion into a proton-antiproton collider and spokesperson of the UA1 experiment, shares the prize with Simon van der Meer, inventor of the stochastic cooling technique, which is vital to the collider’s operation.