Carl David AndersonDied 11 Jan 1991 at age 85 (born 3 Sep 1905).American physicist who shared (with Victor Francis Hess of Austria) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of the positron, or positive electron, the first known particle of antimatter. He examined the photographs of cosmic rays taken as they passed through a Wilson cloud chamber in a strong magnetic field. Besides the curved paths of negative electrons, he found also paths deviating in the opposite direction, corresponding to positively charged particles - yet having the the same mass as an electron! Previously, Dirac had predicted such particles by theoretical solution to electromagnetic field equations. Anderson subsequently found the physical existence of positron. |
