He attended the High School Umberto I of
Rome (the same as
Enrico Fermi), and graduated in
theoretical physics with honors in 1964. The following year he was in
Florence with a
CNR grant, later to become appointed as Professor. From 1967 to 1972 he was a research associate at several prestigious universities in the United States, including
Princeton,
Harvard, and
NYU. From 1974 to 1980 he was a staff member in the theory division of
CERN, in
Geneva. Preparata dedicated a great part of his scientific activity to
high energy physics, giving fundamental contributions to the construction of the
Standard Model, the new synthesis of the subnuclear interactions. In particular, he clarified the nature of the Dirac quantum field of
quarks, a fundamental premise for the electroweak unification, and he proposed a solution to the crucial problem of
colour confinement in
quantum chromodynamics (QCD), based on a non-perturbative analysis of the ground state of QCD. His analysis reveals the existence of a non-trivial ground state of QCD and constitutes an important step forward in our understanding of interacting quantum fields. From 1987 his attention turned to problems in the field of condensed matter and to
nuclear physics, that he tackled armed with the picture of
Quantum Field Theory. Preparata discovered that condensed matter systems, when both at sufficiently low temperatures and high densities will spontaneously develop new coherent solutions of
quantum electrodynamics (QED). This allowed him to face old problems, like liquid water theory, and new ones, like
cold fusion, from a completely new point of view. Moreover, along with Cecilia Saccone (Molecular Biology Professor of
University of Bari), Preparata developed a Markov model of molecular evolution. He published approximately 400 papers in such diverse fields as
subnuclear physics, nuclear physics, physics of
lasers,
superconductivity,
superfluidity, liquid and solid water, condensed matter (glasses, colloids, electrolytes, etc.), physics of
neutron stars,
astrophysics of
Gamma ray bursts, and
cold fusion. A fierce and stubborn character, Preparata often encountered open ostracism from his peers. He liked to reconnect his ideas in theoretical physics to those of Realism. In his last years he taught at the
Department of Physics,
University of Milan, Italy, where he was most influential on a generation of young physicists. He died in Frascati in 2000. ==The Giuliano Preparata Award==