Berkeley Scientific Great Owen Chamberlain Has Died

Chamberlain

Owen Chamberlain, Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the legendary team of scientists at Ernest O. Lawrence’s “Rad Lab” has died. He passed away quietly in his home in Berkeley, on February 28, 2006, following a long struggle with Parkinson's Disease. He was 85.

Chamberlain is most remembered for his role in the discovery of the antiproton in 1955, a role for which he shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics, with his Rad Lab and UC Berkeley colleague, Emilio Segrè. The discovery of the antiproton, the mirror image counterpart to the proton in ordinary matter, was made possible through the combination of the Bevatron accelerator, the world’s most powerful at that time, and a unique detector, designed by Chamberlain and his colleague, Clyde Wiegand, that was set off only by particles moving at the speed predicted for antiprotons. Full story.