After getting his engineer's degree in 1952, Simon van der Meer worked for the Philips Research Laboratory in Eindhoven. When he was there, he was mainly working on high-voltage equipment and electronics for electron microscopes. In 1956, he moved to CERN, which was new at the time. When he first started at CERN, his work was mainly on technical design, and power supplies. While he was working at CERN, he invented the idea of stochastic cooling, which led to the discovery of W and Z bosons. In 1984, van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work with the project. 