# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/c-f-powell
# Generated: 2026-09-07T19:03:49.070Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/c-f-powell"
name: "C. F. Powell"
slug: "c-f-powell"
description: "He found a new particle by staring at film. Powell's photographic method turned cosmic rays into visible tracks, catching the pion — a discovery that earned him the 1950 Nobel and cracked open how the atomic nucleus holds together."
tagline: "British physicist"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Cecil_Powell.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United Kingdom"
  isoCode: "GB"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1903-12-05"
deathDate: "1969-08-09"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  momentum:             3.197492163009405
  historical:           22.053316
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  profileCompleteness:  70
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ranks:
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  country:  null
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Cecil Frank Powell was born on 5 December 1903 in Britain and became an experimental physicist with a knack for making the invisible legible. He led the team that perfected the photographic technique for studying nuclear processes — essentially using special emulsion plates to capture the trails of subatomic particles as they flew through. That method paid off when his group spotted the pion, or pi-meson, a particle that plays a crucial role in binding protons and neutrons inside the nucleus. The work brought him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950. He continued research until his death on 9 August 1969, having given physics a way to see what had been only theory.