Topic

History of physics

A hand-drawn diagram of labeled particle tracks beside the black-and-white bubble chamber photograph it interprets, full of thin white trails.

When physics learned to photograph the invisible

For three decades, particle physics ran on photographs: millions of images of bubble trails in superheated liquid, measured by hand. The bubble chamber shaped what physicists found, and who did the finding.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read