The cloud chamber and CTR Wilson’s legacy to atmospheric science

2011 is the centenary year of the short paper (Wilson,1911) first describing the cloud chamber, the device for visualising high-energy charged particles which earned the Scottish physicist Charles Thomas Rees (‘CTR’) Wilson the 1927 Nobel Prize for physics. His many achievements in atmospheric science, some of which have current relevance, are briefly reviewed here. CTR Wilson’s lifetime of scientific research work was principally in atmospheric electricity at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge; he was Reader in Electrical Meteorology from 1918 and Jacksonian Professor from 1925 to 1935. However, he is immortalised in physics for his invention of the cloud chamber, because of its great significance as an early visualisation tool for particles such as cosmic rays1 (Galison, 1997). Sir Lawrence Bragg summarised its importance:

Thomas Heywood: just in time

The scholarly study of the dramatic works and career of Thomas Heywood has increased significantly in the last fifty years but still lags far behind that of his contemporaries Shakespeare and Jonson. Labelled the ‘prose Shakespeare’ by Charles Lamb in the early nineteenth century, Heywood seems to have been considered by scholars and publishers to be a ghostly figure who haunted the early modern theatrical world. In fact, recent research using archival records shows the ways in which Heywood is at the centre of an extensive and highly networked professional industry.