The Google Doodle launched in the present day (July 11) is a tribute to César Lattes, a pioneering Brazilian physicist who would have celebrated his a hundredth birthday in the present day.
Born to Italian immigrants in 1924 in Curitiba, Brazil, Lattes is extensively credited with the invention of the subatomic particle often called the pion, or pi meson — which is produced within the shockwaves from star explosions and rains down on Earth within the type of cosmic rays.
“Completely satisfied birthday César Lattes, thanks for paving the best way for experimental physics in Latin America and world wide!” Google representatives wrote in a weblog put up honoring Lattes.
Lattes’ induction to superior experimental physics started in 1934 on the just lately based College of São Paulo, the place he was the one pupil enrolled in a course run by the then-famous Italian experimental physicist Giuseppe Occhialini. Occhialini taught Lattes to develop photographic movie uncovered to radiation.
In 1944 Occhialini went to the College of Bristol to work with the English physicist Cecil Frank Powell on the event of nuclear emulsion plates that would detect traces of extremely energetic particles. Consisting of photosensitive silver salt suspended inside gelatin, the plates, upon growth, clearly confirmed the tracks of charged particles that had handed via them.
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After acquiring one of many plates despatched by Occhialini, Lattes realized that it was lacking a key ingredient: boron.
“Lattes accurately suspected that including boron to photographic plates would give him a clearer picture of particles breaking down,” in accordance with the Google weblog put up. “It labored so properly, he may see every proton.”
In April 1947, at 23 years outdated, Lattes climbed 17,060 toes (5,200 meters) to a climate station atop Bolivia’s Mount Chacaltaya with two of his photographic plates. There, clear as day contained in the tracks preserved within the plates, Lattes found a particle that had been predicted however by no means seen — the pion.
Consisting of a quark and an antiquark glued collectively by the sturdy nuclear power, the pion (or pi meson) can are available in three distinct sorts. The invention earned Powell — however neither Lattes nor Occhialini — the 1950 Nobel Prize.
In actual fact, Lattes was nominated seven instances for the Nobel Prize — regardless of by no means having earned a doctorate — however by no means gained.
Lattes later returned to Brazil to show, and died in 2005 from a coronary heart assault within the suburbs close to his São Paulo campus. Regardless of his rockstar standing throughout Brazil and Latin America, Lattes was characteristically nonchalant about his fame.
“I used to be dragged alongside by historical past, and I did my finest,” Lattes instructed the Brazilian science and tradition journal Superinteressante in 1997. “If I had to decide on, in the present day I’d be a veterinarian.”