Science: 1960’s Nobelmen

1960’s Nobelmen

Amid all the hullabaloo about who’s ahead in scientific achievement, the Swedish Academy of Science, which awards Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics, has remained notably indifferent to political leanings. It was not pro-Western sympathy but professional admiration that last week made a pair of U.S. scientists the 1960 Nobel prizewinners in chemistry and physics. The two:

Willard Frank Libby, 51, in chemistry. A lanky (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.), slow-spoken member of the Atomic Energy Commission between 1954 and 1959, Libby is the man who pioneered in carbon 14, by means of which bones, beams and bogs can be dated as far back as 60,000 years ago (TIME cover, Aug. 15, 1955).

Born in Colorado and raised on a fruit ranch in Northern California, Libby studied chemistry at the University of California in Berkeley. He got his doctorate in 1933, went on to teach chemistry at Berkeley. But after Pearl Harbor, he plunged into the supersecret Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb.

After the war, Libby joined the newly formed Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and specialized in peaceful employment of the atom. Investigating the feeble radioactivity of air, he found that a good part of it comes from carbon 14, a radioactive isotope of carbon that is formed when cosmic rays hit nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere. This led to a brilliant idea that has revolutionized a long list of sciences.

Carbon 14 has a half life of 5,700 years, i.e., half its atoms disintegrate in that time, giving off radiation. Living plants absorb C14 from the air, and animals get it from plants. Therefore, newly formed organic matter starts out with a standard amount of carbon 14, but after the plant or animal dies, the C14 in its tissues slowly diminishes. When the amount remaining is measured by means of its radiation, the time that has passed since death can be calculated accurately.

This dating system, which Libby checked on ancient objects of known age, such as human hair from Egyptian tombs, has been fabulously successful. It is now used to date objects as diverse as charcoal from neolithic campfires, and trees killed by Ice Age glaciers. It won Libby his well-deserved Nobel Prize.

Libby’s laboratory career was interrupted by his service on the Atomic Energy Commission. Although he sturdily rebutted some of the less knowledgeable, most hair-raising claims about the horrors of atomic fallout, Libby did not enjoy his AEC job. He never saw an atomic explosion, and may never see one. Moreover, as he said last week of his AEC experience, “There was constant strain and tension there.”

In 1959, Libby resigned his commissionership with a near audible sigh of relief and became a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Los Angeles. He lives close to the campus with his wife and 15-year-old twin daughters, and is busy again on peaceful research.

Donald Glaser, 34, a beamingly boyish professor at the University of California, Berkeley, won the physics prize. Dr. Glaser was born in Cleveland. While in high school (he graduated at 15), he took as much interest in music as in science, and at 16 played the violin in Cleveland’s Philharmonic Orchestra. When he entered Case Institute of Technology, physics finally won precedence over music.

Glaser took his doctorate at Caltech and in 1949 started teaching physics at the University of Michigan. Soon he got the first glimmerings of the seemingly wild idea that won him the Nobel Prize. After watching bubbles appear in freshly opened beer he suspected that they might be affected somehow by cosmic-ray particles striking through the gas-charged liquid. If this was so, the bubbles should be useful for detecting high-energy radiation.

His first attempt to prove this hypothesis was a failure. Glaser brought bottles of beer, soda water and ginger ale into his laboratory (beer was forbidden on campus, he now recalls) and heated them. He placed a radioactive source near a bottle; then he uncapped the bottle. The radiation had no observable effect on the bubbles that burst out of the bottle, but Glaser was not discouraged. Working with almost no funds or encouragement, he built his first successful bubble chamber in 1953. It was half an inch in diameter and was filled with ether. “Ether is cheap,” explains Glaser, “and I could get it at the chemistry store without any red tape.”

The principle behind the bubble chamber is that high-energy charged particles (electrons, protons, mesons, etc.) ionize materials that they pass through by knocking electrons off atoms. Glaser reasoned that these ions should repel one another, and that if they are formed in a liquid that is about to start boiling, they should show as lines of rapidly growing bubbles along the tracks of the particles. This is just what happens when a bubble chamber is made and manipulated in precisely the right way, which is not easy.

By 1955, Glaser’s bubble chambers were working fine. Physicists, it now appeared, had been waiting for just such a piece of apparatus. Every serious physics laboratory now has at least one bubble chamber. The biggest one, at Berkeley, is 72 inches long, filled with liquid hydrogen, and cost $2,000,000.

Young Glaser, a bachelor, climbs low-resistance mountains (“I’m not the rope and piton type of climber”). He is still devoted to music, and may spend part of the $43,627 Nobel Prize on a really good viola. His boss, Chancellor Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel prizewinner himself, says, not wholly in jest, that he realized Glaser was highly eligible for a Nobel Prize and enticed him to Berkeley just in time to get some of the credit for the University of California.