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The Google Doodle release today ( July 11 ) is a tribute to César Lattes , a pioneering Brazilian physicist who would have celebrated his centesimal birthday today .
birth to Italian immigrants in 1924 in Curitiba , Brazil , Lattes is wide credited with the discovery of the subatomic particle known as the pi-meson , or pi meson — which is produced in the shockwaves from star plosion and rains down on Earth in the form of cosmic rays .
Today’s Google Doodle shows César Lattes surrounded by atoms.
" glad birthday César Lattes , give thanks you for paving the way for observational physics in Latin America and around the domain ! " Google representativeswrote in a web log posthonoring Lattes .
Lattes ’ induction to advance observational natural philosophy began in 1934 at the recently founded University of São Paulo , where he was the only pupil enrol in a track run by the then - famous Italian experimental physicist Giuseppe Occhialini . Occhialini taught Lattes to develop photographic film exposed to radiation .
In 1944 Occhialini went to the University of Bristol to cultivate with the English physicist Cecil Frank Powell on the growth of atomic photographic emulsion plate that could detect traces of extremely gumptious speck . Consisting of photosensitive silver common salt suspended inside gelatin , the plate , upon development , intelligibly showed the tracks of charge atom that had passed through them .
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After obtain one of the plate beam by Occhialini , Lattes realized that it was missing a central ingredient : boron .
" Lattes correctly suspected that adding boron to photographic plate would give him a clearer range of atom go against down , " harmonise to the Google blog Emily Price Post . " It worked so well , he could see each proton . "
In April 1947 , at 23 years old , Lattes climbed 17,060 groundwork ( 5,200 meters ) to a weather condition station atop Bolivia ’s Mount Chacaltaya with two of his photographic plates . There , vindicated as mean solar day inside the caterpillar track preserved in the plates , Lattes discovered a particle that had been prefigure but never seen — the pion .
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consist of a quark cheese and an antiquark glue together by the strong atomic forcefulness , the pion ( or pi meson ) can come in three clear-cut types . The discovery realise Powell — but neither Lattes nor Occhialini — the1950 Nobel Prize .
In fact , Lattes was nominated seven times for theNobel Prize — despite never having realize a doctorate — but never make headway .
Lattes later returned to Brazil to instruct , and died in 2005 from a inwardness attack in the suburban area near his São Paulo campus . Despite his rockstar status across Brazil and Latin America , Lattes was characteristically nonchalant about his fame .
" I was drag along by story , and I did my honest , " Lattestold the Brazilian science and culture magazine Superinteressantein 1997 . " If I had to choose , today I would be a veterinarian . "
