Invention and History of the Bubble Chamber

During his talk, Donald Glaser put an end to the rumor that bubbles in beer inspired him to create the bubble chamber, which allows physicists to track electrically charged particles, and which won Glaser the 1960 Nobel Prize.

However, he did consider using beer at one point, Glaser said. He developed the concept for the bubble chamber while at Ann Arbor, Michigan, working with his advisor, Nobel Laureate Carl Anderson. Glaser’s device used glass bulbs filled with liquid. By submerging the bulbs first in cold oil and then in hot oil, he could superheat the liquid. In that state, the liquid is full of potential energy. A charged particle passing through would have enough energy to trigger bubbling and leave a visible trail. A fast action camera would photograph the trail the instant before the liquid began to boil over, providing an image physicists could use. However, Glaser needed a liquid with a low enough surface tension. Too high, and the liquid would not bubble even if a energized by a charged particle.

His experiments with beer left nothing but a stench in the room and raised a few eyebrows, he said. Instead, he filled the tubes with diethyl ether. Later bubble chambers increased in size and used liquid hydrogen.

Glaser is now a professor of physics and neurobiology, at UC  Berkeley’s graduate school. He’s developing computational models of human vision. His graduate lab is a haven for “refugees of high energy physics,” like him, he said.