Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:40:10.713Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Seeing with one's own eyes’ and speaking to the mind: a history of the Wilson cloud chamber in the teaching of physics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2021

Eugenio Bertozzi
Eugenio Bertozzi*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Astronomy and University Museum Network, University of Bologna
*
*Corresponding author: Eugenio Bertozzi, Email: eugenio.bertozzi2@unibo.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 1911 the Wilson cloud chamber opened new possibilities for physics pedagogy. The instrument, which visualized particles’ tracks as trails of condensed vapour, was adopted by physicists to pursue frontier research on the Compton effect, the positron and the transmutation of atomic nuclei. But as the present paper will show, Wilson's instrument did not just open up new research opportunities, but the possibility of developing a different kind of teaching. Equipped with a powerful visualization tool, some physicists–teachers employed Wilson's instrument to introduce their students to a wide range of phenomena and concepts, ranging from the behaviour of clouds to Einstein's photon, the wave–particle duality and the understanding of the nucleus. This paper uses the notes, books and prototypes of these pioneering physicists–teachers to compose a pedagogical history of the Wilson cloud chamber, documenting an episode of immense ingenuity, creativity and scientific imagination.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 177 - 193
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Galison, Peter and Assmus, Alexi, ‘Artificial clouds, real particles’, in Gooding, David, Pinch, Trevor and Schaffer, Simon (eds.), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 225–73Google Scholar.

2 Wilson, Charles Thomson Rees, ‘On a method of making visible the paths of ionising particles through a gas’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1911) 85, pp. 285–8Google Scholar; Wilson, , ‘On an expansion apparatus for making visible the tracks of ionising particles in gases and some results obtained by its use’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1912) 87, pp. 277–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Wilson, Charles Thomson Rees, ‘On the cloud method of making visible ions and the tracks of ionizing particles’, Nobel Lecture (1927), pp. 194–214Google Scholar.

4 Niraj Nath Das Gupta and Surya K. Ghosh, ‘A report on the Wilson cloud chamber and its applications in physics’, Reviews of Modern Physics (1946) 18, pp. 225–90.

5 Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

6 Kent Staley, ‘Golden events and statistics: what's wrong with Galison's image/logic distinction?’, Perspectives on Science (1999) 7, pp. 196–230.

7 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The image of objectivity’, Representations (1992) 40, pp. 81–128.

8 Wolfgang Engels, ‘Die Nebelkammeraufnahme: Das automatisch generierte Laborbuch?’, in Martina Heßler (ed.), Konstruierte Sichtbarkeiten: Wissenschafts- und Technikbilder seit der Frühen Neuzeit, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006, pp. 57–74. For an introduction to the replication method see P. Heering, ‘An experimenter's gotta do what an experimenter's gotta do – but how?’, Isis (2010) 101, pp. 794–805.

9 Eugenio Bertozzi, ‘Establishing and consolidating a research field: the biography of the Wilson cloud chamber in the history of particle physics’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2019) 49(2), pp. 117–50.

10 P. Brenni, ‘From workshop to factory: the evolution of the instrument-making industry, 1850–1930’, in Jed Z. Buchwald and Robert Fox (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 584–650.

11 Paolo Brenni, ‘The Van de Graaff generator: an electrostatic machine for the 20th century’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society (1999) 63, pp. 6–13.

12 Peter Heering and Roland Wittje, The History of Experimental Science Teaching, Thematic Issue, Science & Education (2012) 21(2).

13 See, for example, Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; Karl Hall, ‘“Think less about foundations”: a short course on the course of theoretical physics of Landau and Lifshitz’, in David Kaiser (ed.), Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006, pp. 253–86; Kathryn Olesko, Physics as a Calling: Discipline and Practice in the Königsberg Seminar for Physics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991; Olesko, ‘Science pedagogy as a category of historical analysis: past, present, and future’, Science & Education (2006) 15, pp. 863–80; Massimiliano Badino and Jaume Navarro (eds.), Research and Pedagogy: A History of Early Quantum Physics through Its Textbooks, Edition Open Access, 2013.

14 Wolfgang Gentner, Heinz Maier-Leibnitz and Walther Bothe, Atlas typischer Nebelkammerbilder mit Einführung in die Wilsonsche Methode, Berlin: Julius Springer, 1940; George Dixon Rochester and J.G. Wilson, Cloud Chamber Photographs of the Cosmic Radiation, London: Pergamon Press, 1952.

15 Galison and Asmuss, op. cit. (1).

16 Richard Staley, ‘Fog, dust and rising air: understanding cloud formation, cloud chambers, and the role of meteorology in Cambridge physics in the late 19th century’, in James R. Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic and Deborah Coen (eds.), Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate, New York: Science History Publications, 2006, pp. 93–113, 103.

17 Richard Tetley Glazebrook and William Napier Shaw, Practical Physics: Textbooks of Science, London: Longmans Green, 1885.

18 Wilson Notebook A1, 27–8 March; Staley, op. cit. (16), ref. 10, p. 103.

19 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, ‘On the formation of cloud in the absence of dust’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, (1895) 8, p. 306.

20 John Joseph Thomson, ‘On the charge of electricity carried by the ions produced by Röntgen rays’, Philosophical Magazine (1898) 46, pp. 528–45.

21 E.A. Davis and Isobel Falconer, J.J. Thomson and the Discovery of the Electron, London: Taylor and Francis, 1997; Dong-Won Kim, Leadership and Creativity: A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1919, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. For other relevant literature on Thomson and the electron see Jed Z. Buchwald and Andrew Warwick (eds.), Histories of the Electron: The Birth of Microphysics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; Nadia Robotti, ‘J.J. Thomson and the Cavendish Laboratory: the history of an electric charge measurement’, Annals of Science (1995) 52, pp. 265–84; Jaume Navarro, A History of the Electron: J.J. and G.P. Thomson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

22 Michael Longair, Maxwell's Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, Chapter 7, p. 576 n. 18.

23 John Henry Poynting and Joseph John Thomson, A Textbook of Physics: Properties of Matter, 5th edn, London: C. Griffin, 1909, preface.

24 John Henry Poynting and Joseph John Thomson, A Textbook of Physics: Heat, 2nd edn, London: C. Griffin, 1906, p. 168.

25 Poynting and Thomson, op. cit. (24), p. 169.

26 John Aitken, ‘On the number of dust particles in the atmosphere’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1888) 35(1), pp. 1–19.

27 John Aitken, ‘On the number of dust particles in the atmosphere of certain places in Great Britain and on the continent, with remarks on the relation between the amount of dust and meteorological phenomena’, Nature (1890) 41, pp. 394–6.

28 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, ‘On the condensation nuclei produced in gases by Röntgen rays, uranium rays, ultra-violet light, and other agents’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1899) 64, pp. 127–9. Actually, Wilson's final observations point out four regimes for condensation bounded by three values of the expansion ratio (instead of two bounded by one): no condensation in dust-free air below 1.25, distinct raindrops between 1.25 and 1.31, sudden increase in the number of drops at 1.31, dense fog above 1.37. The textbook refers to previous observations.

29 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, ‘The effect of Röntgen's rays on cloudy condensation’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1896) 59, pp. 338–9; Wilson, ‘On the action of the uranium rays on the condensation of the water vapour’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1897) 9, pp. 333–8.

30 Clinton Chaloner, ‘The most wonderful experiment in the world: a history of the cloud chamber’, BJHS (1997) 30(3), pp. 357–74.

31 Roland Wittje, ‘Simplex sigillum veri: Robert Pohl and demonstration experiments in physics after the Great War’, in Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (eds.), Learning by Doing: Experiments and Instruments in the History of Science Teaching, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011, pp. 317–48.

32 Rudolf Hilsch, ‘Eine Nebelkammer für Vorlesungsversuche’, Physicalische Zeitschrift (1939) 40, pp. 594–5.

33 Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett and Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao Occhialini, ‘Some photographs of the tracks of penetrating radiation’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A (1933) 139, pp. 699–719.

34 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, ‘On a new type of expansion apparatus’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A (1933) 142, pp. 88–91. In the ‘pressure-driven mechanism’ introduced by Wilson in 1933 the expansion and condensation of the vapour in tracks are not induced by expanding the volume of the chamber but by decreasing the pressure within it: the new apparatus still has a chamber in a horizontal position and a fixed floor made of a porous diaphragm covered with a dark velvet felt: the downward motion of a sheet of thin elastic membrane placed underneath the floor sucked away an amount of gas, reducing the pressure and inducing the condensation.

35 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson and J.G. Wilson, ‘On the falling cloud-chamber and on a radial-expansion chamber’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1935) 148, pp. 523–33.

36 Hilsch, op. cit. (32).

37 Jürgen Teichmann, Zur Geschichte der Festkörperphysik: Farbzentrenforschung bis 1940, Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1988.

38 ‘Biographische Notizen von Robert Wichard Pohl: Erinnerungen an die Anfänge der Festkörperphysik in Göttingen und Lebenslauf und politische Haltung von R.W. Pohl / zusammengestellt und bearbeitet von Robert Otto Pohl Göttingen’, GOEDOC, Dokumenten- und Publikationsserver der Georg-August-Universität, 2013, at http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl/?webdoc-3896. Pohl's textbooks cover the subjects of mechanics, acoustics and thermodynamics (vol. 1), electricity (vol. 2) and optics (vol. 3), then extend to atomic physics. They have been published in different editions, from the 1930s until today.

39 Milena Wazeck, Einstein's Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Alan Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

40 ‘Erinnerungen an die Anfänge der Festkörperphysik in Göttingen’, op. cit. (38), p. 14.

41 Robert Wichard Pohl, Einführung in die Physik, vol. 2: Elektrizitätslehre, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1931, pp. 221–6.

42 Robert Wichard Pohl, Einführung in die Physik, vol. 3: Optik, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1948, p. 306.

43 Pohl, op. cit. (42), p. 308.

44 Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, ‘The ejection of protons from nitrogen nuclei, photographed by the Wilson method’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A (1925) 107, pp. 349–61; Carl Anderson, ‘Positives’, Science (1932) 76, pp. 238–9; Anderson, ‘The positive electron’, Physical Review (1933) 43, pp. 491–4.

45 George Dixon Rochester and J.G. Wilson, Cloud Chamber Photographs of the Cosmic Radiation, London: Pergamon Press, Ltd, 1952, p. vii.

46 Mary Joe Nye, ‘Temptations of theory, strategies of evidence: P.M.S. Blackett and the Earth's magnetism, 1947–52’, BJHS (1999) 32(1), pp. 69–92.

47 Jeff Hughes, ‘“Modernists with a vengeance”: changing cultures of theory in nuclear science, 1920–1930’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics (1998) 29, pp. 339–67.

48 Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, ‘The craft of experimental physics’, in H. Wright (ed.), Cambridge University Studies, London: Nicholson and Watson, 1933, pp. 67–96, 87–8, 91, reported in Blackett, op. cit. (49).

49 As well as his teaching, Ballario was a cosmic-ray physicist who had developed an expertise in the Wilson method and participated in numerous innovations. In 1947, for example, he participated in the construction of a sophisticated Wilson cloud chamber – a fully automatized, multiplate type, equipped with a system for the spatial reconstruction of the events – installed on the Testa Grigia Laboratory in the Italian–Swiss Alps, at 3,500 meters.

50 Eugenio Bertozzi, ‘Technology-embedding instruments and performative goals: the case of the fully automatized cloud chamber by the Officine Galileo in Florence’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society (2016) 129, pp. 34–42.

51 The correspondence between Carlo Ballario and the Officine Galileo company is available within the Fondo Ballario held by the Archivio del Museo di Fisica, Department of Physics of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Italy. The mentioned material is in folder n. 2 at www.archividelnovecento.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=486&catid=3&lang=it.

52 Gentner, Maier-Leibnitz and Bothe, op. cit. (14).

53 George Dixon Rochester and Clifford Charles Butler, ‘Evidence for the existence of new unstable elementary particles’, Nature (1947) 160, pp. 855–7.

54 Rudolph, John L., Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education, New York: Palgrave and St Martin's Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Brenni, op. cit. (10), p. 223.

56 Examples of instrument companies here are Leybold and Phywe in Germany, as well as Nuclear Chicago and PASCO in the United States

57 In a diffusion cloud chamber, the formation of the tracks is not induced by keeping a stable gradient of temperature between the floor and the ceiling of the chamber. The method was introduced by Alexander Langsdorf in 1939. See Alexander S. Langsdorf, ‘The development of a thermally activated, continuously sensitive cloud chamber, and its use in nuclear physics research’, PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, 1937.

58 The Project Physics Course was active from 1962 to 1972 and centred at Harvard University. The directors of this project were F. James Rutherford, Gerald Holton and Fletcher G. Watson. The Project Physics Course, 1st edn, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

59 Glaeser, Manfred, Die Nebelkammer im experimentellen Unterricht, Cologne: Aulis Verlag, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Kaiser, David, ‘Stick-figure realism: conventions, reification, and the persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948–1964’, Representations (2000) 70, pp. 49–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.