Donald A. Glaser

Donald A. Glaser invented the bubble chamber in 1952, a groundbreaking particle detector used to observe the paths of electrically charged subatomic particles. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention, which revolutionized the field of high-energy physics.

The idea reportedly came to Glaser in 1952 while he was staring at bubbles forming in a glass of beer. He replaced the gas used in older cloud chambers with superheated liquid hydrogen to create a much denser medium for tracking high-energy particles.

After winning the Nobel Prize and pioneering the bubble chamber, Glaser shifted his research focus entirely away from physics. He transitioned into molecular biology and cancer research, eventually conducting experiments at the University of California, Berkeley.

While Glaser's bubble chamber revolutionized particle physics in the mid-20th century, it was eventually replaced by the multi-wire proportional chamber. Electronic detectors, like those used in the Large Hadron Collider, can capture collision data much faster and digitally feed it directly to computers.