On this day: 100 years ago, Donald Glaser, inventor of the bubble chamber, was born

Donald Glaser was born on September 21, 1926 — an American physicist and winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was born in Cleveland and died in Berkeley in 2013 at the age of 86. He became interested in physics while still at school, and earned his doctorate at Caltech in 1950.

He invented the bubble chamber while working at the University of Michigan. The idea is simple: a superheated liquid in a glass vessel boils along the trajectory of a charged particle, and a chain of bubbles stretches out behind it — a track that can be photographed and analyzed. Glaser built the first prototype using ether.

The earlier Wilson chambers did not satisfy him: there, particles collided with metal plates that obscured the picture, and the device had to be reset between shots. Later, Glaser showed that liquid hydrogen would work instead of ether.

He received the 1960 Nobel Prize precisely for this invention. The chamber made it possible to see what happens to high-energy beams in accelerators and opened the way to many further discoveries. That same year, Glaser made Time magazine's list of "People of the Year."

There is also an amusing detail: a popular version holds that the idea was suggested by the bubbles in a glass of beer. Glaser himself denied this, but admitted that he really did fill the first prototypes with beer.

Over time his interests shifted. From 1962 he took up molecular biology, studied the development of cancer cells, automated laboratory procedures, and in 1971 became one of the founders of Cetus Corporation — a company described as the first in biotechnology. Later he switched to neuroscience and modeling the visual system.

Image: Wikimedia Commons Public domain

Translation editor: Ловушкин А.