Owen Chamberlain

Owen Chamberlain was born July 10, 1920, and built his career in American physics during the postwar particle boom. Working alongside Emilio Segrè, he hunted for the antiproton, the antimatter mirror of the proton, using Berkeley's new accelerator to smash particles at energies high enough to conjure it from pure collision. They caught it in 1955, a discovery that confirmed a fundamental symmetry in nature and earned them both the Nobel Prize in Physics. Chamberlain spent decades after that in the same territory, refining what particle accelerators could reveal about the hidden architecture of…