Tag Archives: bubble chamber

More about bubble chambers

Imagine (or not) my surprise at running across a story about how bubble chambers were developed just a day after discovering The Bubble Chamber blog. I found the story serendipitously when reading the Sam Kean book about the periodic table of elements, The Disappearing Spoon. Here’s my seriously shortened version of the story Kean tells:

A young scientist by the name of Donald Glaser was drinking beer and while staring at the bubbles streaming though it got to thinking about particle physics. (Glaser was a junior faculty member at the nearby University of Michigan in the early 1950s when this took place.) There was a belief amongst physicists of that time that particles might lead to the overthrow of the periodic table of elements as the fundamental map of matter. But, the inability to ‘see’ the particles was holding the physicists back. That night, Glaser, inspired by his beer, decided that bubbles might serve as a means to ‘see’ particles.

In his first attempt to create a bubble chamber, Glaser used beer as the liquid at which he aimed an atomic gun in order to bombard it with particles. The first attempts didn’t work and left a bad smell in the lab so Glaser and a colleague refined the experiment to use liquid hydrogenin place of the beer. This refinement worked so well that Glaser won the Nobel Prize at the age of 33.