Nobel Prize winners typically wait a decade or two--or even more--between the time they make their award-winning discovery and the time they actually receive the Prize. The most striking exception to that general rule occurred in 1984 when Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer were awarded the Prize for physics for their discovery of the W and Z bosons only a year earlier.

The Rubbia-van der Meer research had been conceived more than a decade earlier, inspired by the electroweak theory proposed by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg. That theory explains how the electromagnetic and weak forces are both manifestations of a single fundamental force, the electroweak force. One consequence of the theory was the prediction that three new force-carrying particles, the W+, W-, and Z0 boson existed.

The technical problem was that those particles are identifiable only at very high energies, beyond those of most...