Word: glasers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Donald Glaser, 34, a beamingly boyish professor at the University of California, Berkeley, won the physics prize. Dr. Glaser was born in Cleveland. While in high school (he graduated at 15), he took as much interest in music as in science, and at 16 played the violin in Cleveland's Philharmonic Orchestra. When he entered Case Institute of Technology, physics finally won precedence over music...
...Glaser took his doctorate at Caltech and in 1949 started teaching physics at the University of Michigan. Soon he got the first glimmerings of the seemingly wild idea that won him the Nobel Prize. After watching bubbles appear in freshly opened beer he suspected that they might be affected somehow by cosmic-ray particles striking through the gas-charged liquid. If this was so, the bubbles should be useful for detecting high-energy radiation...
...first attempt to prove this hypothesis was a failure. Glaser brought bottles of beer, soda water and ginger ale into his laboratory (beer was forbidden on campus, he now recalls) and heated them. He placed a radioactive source near a bottle; then he uncapped the bottle. The radiation had no observable effect on the bubbles that burst out of the bottle, but Glaser was not discouraged. Working with almost no funds or encouragement, he built his first successful bubble chamber in 1953. It was half an inch in diameter and was filled with ether. "Ether is cheap," explains Glaser...
...principle behind the bubble chamber is that high-energy charged particles (electrons, protons, mesons, etc.) ionize materials that they pass through by knocking electrons off atoms. Glaser reasoned that these ions should repel one another, and that if they are formed in a liquid that is about to start boiling, they should show as lines of rapidly growing bubbles along the tracks of the particles. This is just what happens when a bubble chamber is made and manipulated in precisely the right way, which is not easy...
Glass & Golf. The first bubble chamber, invented in 1953 by Dr. Donald Glaser of the University of Michigan, was a glass tube filled with ether at a temperature that would make it start to boil when pressure was suddenly reduced. If high-energy particles (e.g., protons from a cyclotron) are shot into the ether at the right moment, lines of bubbles form on their trails, thus showing where the particles go and how they interact with atoms in the ether. When Inventor Glaser delivered his classic paper at a Washington physics convention. Physicist Luis Alvarez, associate director of the Radiation...