The brilliant young scientist from Brazil who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discoveries
The Google Doodle for today honors César Lattes, a Brazilian experimental physicist and educator whose discovery of the pion altered the direction of nuclear physics, on his 100th birthday.
"Happy birthday, César Lattes! Thank you for paving the way for experimental physics in Latin America and around the world," Google wrote in a tribute to him.
"Lattes was right to surmise that he would be able to see particles breaking down more clearly if he added boron to photographic plates. He was able to observe every proton since it operated so effectively.
César Lattes is who?
Lattes studied physics and mathematics while growing up in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, where he was born into an Italian immigrant family. He later continued his education at the University of São Paulo, where he received his degree in 1943.
He established the Brazilian Centre for Physical Research at the age of 25, collaborating with other associates who would later become prominent figures in the field of physics.
Lattes, who studied under European instructors like Gleb Wataghin and Giuseppe Occhialini, was regarded as the most gifted member of his cohort, along with Oscar Sala, Mário Schenberg, Roberto Salmeron, Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos, and Jayme Tiomno.
Lattes began his primary research on cosmic rays between 1946 and 1948. He then traveled to Bristol, England, to continue his work on nuclear emulsion research at the University of Bristol.
By creating high-energy collisions in a unique lead chamber using nuclear emission plates he designed, his research group discovered "fireballs" at the top of the Andes in 1969.
A heart attack in the suburbs close to Lattes' São Paulo campus later claimed his life in 2005 at the age of 80.
What is a pion? In 1947, April, Lattes traveled to a weather station atop a 5,200-meter high mountain in Bolivia with two photographic plates to collect more cosmic rays than could be obtained at a lower altitude. It was at this location that Lattes, then only twenty-four years old, discovered a particle that had never been observed before the pion, also known as pi mesons. Pions are particles smaller than an atom composed of a quark and an antiquark, and are created when space matter crashes into Earth's atmosphere. Later, Lattes calculated that some pions are actually heavier than others, which ultimately earned him a 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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