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 Dr Eugenio
Bertozzi,
Deutsches Museum, Humboldt-Universität, Università di Bologna: A special trajectory among the many: The biography of the Wilson cloud chamber as an instrument for teaching  “The Wilson cloud chamber”
introduced by the Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees
Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1911
has been one of the most significant instruments of 20th
Century physics. For the first time, the radioactive
emission imperceptible to the senses became visible: when
a radioactive source was placed inside the chamber, trails
of water droplets formed along the trajectories followed
by the emitted particles. The instrument, welcomed by
Ernst Rutherford as the “The most wonderful experiment in
the world”, earned Wilson the Nobel Prize in 1927 and
played a central role in capital discoveries such as the
experimental confirmation of the existence of the
anti-matter in 1932. Surprisingly, after more than one
hundred years, the cloud chamber is still on the stage of
research as “core” of the experiment CLOUD currently
in-progress at the CERN and focused on the study of
atmospheric physics and climate science. In this
talk I will look at the Wilson instrument not as a device
to be perfected for pursuing new researches but as one to
be adapted for teaching physics in schools and colleges:
in other words, I will retrace the special trajectory
which brought a “milestone” of physics research to enter,
adapt and gradually stabilise within the context of
education, becoming a “classic” within the usual set of
instruments that nowadays can be found in a modern school
laboratory. Along this complex process of stabilization,
the invention of smart strategies for re-creating a
delicate experiment in the classroom, the creativity in
using the same device for explaining different aspects of
physics fitting with a changeable school curriculum and
the beliefs of researchers, designers and teachers on “how
a teaching instrument should be made” and, ultimately,
“how physics should be taught” are the main insights which
will be offered and discussed in the talk. tirsdag
den 28. marts, kl. 17
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