Abstract
THE appearance of Prof. C. T. R. Wilson's name in the list of Nobel prize winners for 1927 will be received with acclam t n by physicists throughOut the world. The polised perfection of his experimental work and the subtle ingenuity of his methods have long bee he admiration and the despair of workers in the same or in cognate fields. Prof. Wilson is, perhaps, best known for his experiments on the tracks of ionising particles in gases, work which has occupied him, at intervals, from the time when he joined the first group of research students under Sir J. J. Thomson, some thirty years ago. His discovery that gaseous ions would serve as nuclei for the deposition of water drops was the basis of the first methods of measuring the charge on an electron. With definite patience and resource, the technique of these early experiments has been gradually perfected, until now it is possible to make visible, and to photograph, the actual tracks of ionising particles, to count their number, and to watch every twist and turn ir their paths. The power of rendering visible, at will,the actual paths of particles which, themselves, must remain for ever invisible is a weapon of no small value in investigating the behaviour of these particles, and Prof. Wilson's apparatus is being employed more and more in our great research laboratories, almost always with striking and important success. Prof. Wilson, however, is not known only by his work on ‘tracks.’ He is one of our foremost experts on atmospheric electricity; and it would be both unfair and ungrateful not to recall in conclusion his ‘tilted’ electroscope, a measuring device which made possible much of the early work on ionisation in gases.
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[News and Views]. Nature 120, 737–741 (1927). https://doi.org/10.1038/120737a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/120737a0