Giuseppe Cocconi

Giuseppe Cocconi
Born	1914 Como
Died	November 9, 2008 Geneva
Citizenship	Italian
Fields	Particle and high-energy physics, Cosmic ray research
Institutions	University of Catania Cornell University Sapienza University of Rome CERN: Proton Synchrotron Brookhaven National Laboratory
Alma mater	University of Milan
Known for	Pomeron, Roman pot, CHARM, CERN director
Notable awards	Guggenheim Fellowship

Giuseppe Cocconi (1914–2008) was a director of the Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva. He is known for his work in particle physics and for his involvement with SETI.

Cocconi was born in Como, Italy in 1914. He went to study physics at the University of Milan, and then in February 1938, went to the Sapienza University of Rome on the invitation of Edoardo Amaldi. There he met physicists Enrico Fermi, and Gilberto Bernardini. With Fermi, he built a Wilson chamber to study the disintegration of mesons. In August of that year, Cocconi laid the foundation of cosmic ray research in Milan. While at Milan, Cocconi supervised Vanna Tongiorgi, who picked cosmic rays as her thesis' subject, and later married her in 1945.

In 1942, Cocconi was nominated professor at University of Catania, but was engaged by the Italian army to research infrared phenomena for the Italian airforce until the end of World War II, in late 1944. He taught at Catania until 1947, when Hans Bethe made a request that he would join Cornell University. 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. In 1955, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. 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.

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