Donald Glaser Biography

The work for which Donald Glaser is best known, his bubble chamber invention for tracking the movement of high-energy particles, is said to have begun over a glass of beer. In the early 1950s, while teaching physics at the University of Michigan, Glaser followed a hunch that bubbles rising from a glass of beer might provide a clue for detecting high-energy radiation. Although his first attempt to prove this hypothesis, using beer, soda water, and ginger ale, failed, he kept working. In 1953 he created a small bubble chamber filled with superheated ether that was successful in capturing the trail of bubbles left by nuclear particles as they passed through the liquid. The bubble chamber invention won Glaser the 1960 Nobel Prize in physics and was a vital step in understanding atomic function. It also enabled the discovery of new atomic particles, such as the rho and omega minus particles, at the same time advancing visualization of charged-particle interactions, and furthering the study of particle mass, lifetime, and decay modes.

Donald Arthur Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 21, 1926, to William and Lena Glaser. Glaser's parents had come to the United States from Russia. His father operated a wholesale sundries business in Cleveland and Glaser attended elementary and secondary schools there. As a child he was given violin and viola lessons. Later he studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. An accomplished musician, he became a member of a local symphony orchestra at age 16. Glaser remained in Cleveland for his undergraduate education, entering Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) to study mathematics and physics. He completed his graduate course work at the California Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. in 1950, a year after he accepted a position as instructor at the University of Michigan. He remained at Michigan until 1959, and was made full professor there in 1957 at the age of 31. He left Michigan to accept a visiting professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. That position was made permanent, and Glaser was to remain at Berkeley for the rest of his career, except for brief periods away on fellowships.

Bubble Chamber Fills a Gap

Other physicists before Glaser had attempted to make nuclear particles visible. The 1927 Nobel Prize was given to C. T. R. Wilson, a British scientist, for his cloud chamber method. In 1950 Cecil F. Powell received that honor for an emulsion method. But both these methods, while effective for elementary particle study, became inadequate with the advent of high-energy particle acceleration machines, such as that built at Berkeley in the late 1950s. These accelerators had capacities 1,000 times greater than those used for the cloud chamber and emulsion techniques.

Continuing to refine the bubble chamber method he had developed at the University of Michigan, Glaser next tried superheated liquids of higher density, such as liquid hydrogen and xenon gas. Experiments with these liquids provided glimpses of subatomic functions never before seen, and made possible the tracking of neutral as well as charged particles. As Glaser continued to refine his bubble chamber methods, information gathering increased a thousandfold. For example, in his first two years at Berkeley, Glaser was able to collect almost half a million tracking photographs. The machine that made this possible was Berkeley's new, two-million-dollar bubble chamber. Built by Luis W. Alvarez, the size of this bubble chamber was 6 ft (1.8 m) long, quite a jump from the 0.5-1.0 in (1.3-2.5 cm) bubble chambers Glaser had used earlier. The Berkeley bubble chamber was capable of measuring particle tracks at a rate of every 14 seconds, shooting three photographs of each instance. Science magazine reported that the Nobel Prize committee credited Glaser's bubble chamber invention with filling "the wide gap in range" left by the cloud chamber and the emulsion methods. Kai M. Siegbahn, speaking for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said: "Several other scientists also left important contributions to the practical shaping of different types of bubble chambers, but Glaser is the one who made the really fundamental contribution."

In the years after receiving the Nobel Prize, Glaser extended his knowledge of physics to the field of molecular biology. He studied microbiology at the University of Copenhagen in 1961, then returned to Berkeley, where he did research on bacterial evolution, regulation of cell growth, and the causes of cancer and genetic mutation. Using photo-analyzing equipment developed for the bubble chamber, Glaser was able to identify bacterial species through computer scanning. He was made professor of physics and molecular biology at Berkeley in 1964. Glaser retained his lifelong love of music, often playing with local chamber music groups. His other pastimes have included mountain climbing, tennis, and sailing. During his career, he has held membership in the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to the Nobel Prize in physics, he was awarded the Henry Russel Award of the University of Michigan in 1955, the Charles Vernon Boys Prize of the Physical Society in London in 1958, the American Physical Society Prize in 1959, the Gold Medal of the Case Institute of Technology in 1967, and the Alumni Distinguished Service Award from the California Institute of Technology, also in 1967. He married the former Ruth Louise Thompson in 1960. They had two children, a son, William, and a daughter, Louise.