Talk:Rosemary Fowler

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only peripherally related to Nobel prize

The sentence in the lede "Her discovery contributed to the Nobel Prize for Physics that was awarded to her doctoral supervisor Cecil Powell two years later" is rather misleading. Powell's Nobel prize was for the technique, and for discovering the pion with it, not for the kaon. e.g., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecil-Powell

I suggest at a minimum this sentence should be removed from the lede, and the discussion in the body should be a little more clear that, no, Powell did not get the Nobel prize for the particle that Fowler discovered.

(However, I did add a sentence to the lede pointing out that her discovery actually was important in physics.)

Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 14:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No objection to that change. I don't think it's entirely true, though, that Powell's Nobel prize was just for the technique and for the pion discovery, as multiple more recent sources support the statement that Brown's work "contributed" to his prize. And the official prize wording was "his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method." (note plural word mesons; that can only so far as I know refer to both the pion and the kaon discoveries). Anyway, the article as currently written does capture that. MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:50, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The plural of the word "mesons" refers to pi-meson and mu-meson. Here is the discussion of his work on meson tracks from cosmic rays from the speech presenting the Nobel Prize :

Analysis of these stars showed that some of them had been produced by a particle of small mass... A more detailed investigation showed that the active particle was a meson... The analysis of the traces of primary and secondary mesons indicated the probable existence of two kinds of mesons having different masses, a theory which was vindicated by further experiments. The primary mesons were named (p)-mesons and the secondary mesons, µ-mesons. Preliminary determinations of the masses showed that the mass of the (p)-meson was greater than that of the µ-meson.

Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 18:48, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I hadn't seen that. The language of the Powell's Nobel citation is somewhat non-specific (possibly intentionally). If as you suggest the plural term 'mesons' refers to pi-mesons (pions) and mu-mesons (muons) that would be odd, as the latter were discovered ten years earlier in 1937. Muons were indeed seen in these experiments, but were not discovered by Powell and his team. Recent sources support the statement that Brown's work "contributed" to Powell's prize, a statement that I see you've removed. I think it should be included; without it, there is no relevance in mentioning the Nobel Prize at all. MichaelMaggs (talk) 19:16, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]