Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
Scottish physicist and meteorologist (1869-1959) · United Kingdom · Scientists · Died at 90
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Something wrong?A physicist who made the invisible visible: Wilson built a device that let scientists see the fleeting tracks of subatomic particles for the first time, turning quantum theory from abstraction into something you could photograph.
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About this person
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson was born on 14 February 1869 in Britain, trained as a meteorologist and physicist, and spent years puzzling over how to capture what no one had seen. His invention - the cloud chamber - used vapor to reveal the paths of charged particles as they tore through space, trails of condensation marking where electrons and alpha rays had just been. The device became essential to atomic research, a way to witness the architecture of matter itself. In 1927 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Arthur Compton for the work. He died on 15 November 1959.
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