Oreste Piccioni

Oreste Piccioni ( born October 24, 1915 in Siena, † April 13, 2002 in Rancho Santa Fe, California ) was an Italian physicist.

Piccioni 1934 visited the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, but was in the same year to Rome to study at the University La Sapienza in Enrico Fermi, where he received his doctorate in 1938. As a result, he dealt with the composition of cosmic rays and in particular the life of the pions. Piccioni's working group could also prove that these mesons are not the carriers of the strong interaction, as was thought at the time. During the Second World War Piccioni tried to flee from the Nazis, but was captured and arrested. However, a friend was able to free him through bribery, then he built radios for the Italian underground.

In 1946 he moved to the United States, where he was appointed because of his work on the cosmic radiation at MIT, from 1948, he was at Brookhaven National Laboratory operates. In 1956 he was involved in the discovery of Antineutrons. With Abraham Pais, he developed a theory of the kaons.

In 1960 he received a professorship at the University of California, San Diego, where he established a working group for particle physics.

Best known in Piccioni but for an incident that was unique in the history of science by then. In 1954 he discussed with Emilio Segre and Owen Chamberlain of the technical possibilities, the evidence antiproton using the Bevatrons. In 1959 Segre and Chamberlain the Nobel Prize for Physics, Piccioni mentioned but not a word about what this them very resented. Segrè promised Piccioni to help with his naturalization, which was because of the political views Piccioni's not so simple, the process dragged on, at least in the length. In 1972 he brought a lawsuit with a claim for damages over $ 125,000 against the two, but this was rejected due to statute of limitations. However, the court gave him basically right. The intervention of a judge in science questions was breaking a taboo and Piccioni thus made ​​himself unpopular among physicists, which ultimately led to his move to San Diego. In 1986 he retired, he was awarded the Matteucci Medal 1999.