C. F. Powell

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.