The Google Doodle, released today (July 11), pays tribute to pioneering Brazilian physicist Cesar Lattes, who would have turned 100 today.
Born in 1924 in Curitiba, Brazil to Italian immigrants, Lattes is widely known as the discoverer of subatomic particles known as pions or pions, which are produced in the shock waves of exploding stars and rain down on Earth in the form of cosmic rays.
“Happy birthday, César Lattes. Thank you for paving the way for experimental physics in Latin America and around the world!” Google representative I wrote a blog post Praise the Latte.
Lattes’ first exposure to advanced experimental physics came at the recently founded University of São Paulo in 1934, when he was the only student enrolled in a course run by the famous Italian experimental physicist Giuseppe Occhiarini, who taught Lattes how to develop photographic film by exposing it to radiation.
In 1944, Occhiarini went to the University of Bristol, where he worked with British physicist Cecil Frank Powell on developing a nuclear emulsion that could detect the signatures of high-energy particles. Made of light-sensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin, the plates, when developed, clearly showed the tracks of charged particles that passed through them.
After obtaining one of the plates sent by Occhiarini, Lattes realized that it was missing a key ingredient: boron.
“Lattes correctly surmised that adding boron to his photographic plates would allow him to get a clearer picture of the particles decaying,” a Google blog post said. “This worked so well that he was able to see individual protons.”
In April 1947, at the age of 23, Lattes took two photographic plates and climbed 17,060 feet (5,200 meters) to a weather station on the summit of Mount Chacaltaya in Bolivia. There, he clearly spotted a predicted but never-before-seen particle, the pion, in the tracks preserved on the plates.
Pions (or pions), which are quarks and antiquarks bound together by the strong nuclear force, can be classified into three different types. This discovery led Powell, rather than Lattes or Occhiarini, to 1950 Nobel Prize.
In fact, Lattes has been nominated seven times. Nobel Prize — despite never having completed a PhD — and never having won one.
Lattes later returned to Brazil to teach until he died of a heart attack near the campus in São Paulo in 2005. Despite his rock-star status in Brazil and across Latin America, Lattes was not one to let his fame bother him.
“History has dragged us down and we’ve done our best,” Lattes said. He spoke to the Brazilian scientific and cultural magazine Superinteresante. 1997. “If I had to choose, I would want to be a veterinarian right now.”
