Carl David Anderson

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Biography

Early Life

Carl David Anderson, who was born of Swedish parents - his father was Carl David Anderson and his mother Emma Adolfina Ajaxson - in New York City (USA) on 3rd September, 1905, has spent the bulk of his life in the United States.

Education

Carl David Anderson graduated from Caltech with a B.Sc. and a PhD in physics and Engineering in 1927 and 1930, respectively.2 His doctoral thesis and subsequent work as a postdoc dealt with X-rays. But soon cosmic rays were discovered by physicist Victor Hess (with whom Anderson would later share the Nobel Prize), and Anderson began research on these high energy particles.

Notable Discoveries

In 1932, Anderson, then a postdoc in the physics department at California Institute of Technology, was photographing the track of a cosmic ray particle in a cloud chamber. The track had an unusual curvature, and he deduced that it could only be produced by a particle “carrying a positive charge but having a mass of the same order of magnitude as that normally possessed by a free negative electron."1 He called this positively-charged electron a positron – the first identified antiparticle. For his accomplishment, Anderson shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936. He was 31 years old.

References

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1936/anderson-bio.html http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/anderson.html https://www.aps.org/programs/outreach/history/historicsites/anderson.cfm