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‘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: [email protected]
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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
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science

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References

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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

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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).

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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.

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