Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Carl Anderson

Carl Anderson

Lived 1905 – 1991.

Carl Anderson discovered the positron in 1932, proving the existence of antimatter. He discovered the muon in 1936. Anderson was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the positron.

Achievements and Key Points

In 1932, Carl Anderson:
  • Took photographs of tracks made by cosmic rays as they passed through a cloud chamber he had designed himself.
  • Saw the track of a particle whose behavior was like no particle he had seen before.
  • Correctly interpreted the track, stating it was made by a particle with the mass of an electron, but carrying the opposite charge.
  • Realized he had observed antimatter – the antielectron predicted by Paul Dirac in 1931.
  • Agreed to call the new particle the positron.
In 1936, Carl Anderson:
  • Discovered the muon while studying cosmic rays.
  • Identified the muon as a subatomic particle whose charge is identical to the electron.
  • Found that the muon’s mass is higher than the electron and smaller than the proton.
Advertisements

Beginnings

Carl David Anderson was born on September 3, 1905 in New York City, USA. His parents arrived in New York from Sweden in their late teens. His father, also named Carl David Anderson, was a restaurant manager. His mother, Emma Adolfina Ajaxson, was a housewife. Carl was their only child.

In 1912, when Carl was six, his family moved from New York to Los Angeles. His parents were not interested in science, but from about age seven, Carl became increasingly interested in technology, building primitive radio sets.

Education

Carl Anderson hoped to become an electrical engineer. He attended L. A. Polytechnic High School, a public school that concentrated on technical subjects. He graduated from high school in 1923, age 17.

Next came Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena where he intended majoring in Electrical Engineering. While at Caltech he lived at home because his father and mother had separated, and Anderson could not afford to live away from home.

In his sophomore year, he learned about modern physics and was astonished by how much he loved it compared with the more basic physics he learned at school. He changed to Physics as a major. In 1927, age 21, he received a Bachelor’s degree in both Engineering and Physics.

Anderson continued at Caltech as a graduate student, receiving a PhD in 1930, age 24, for a cloud-chamber study of electrons scattered by X-rays. His doctoral thesis was entitled: Space-Distribution of X-Ray Photoelectrons Ejected from the K and L Atomic Energy-Levels.

He spent the rest of his working life at Caltech.

The Positron

Anderson began working with Robert Millikan, famous for determining the amount of charge on the electron.

Cosmic Rays

Millikan was studying cosmic rays – high energy particles reaching the earth from the sun and the stars.

Cosmic rays produce interesting debris when they crash into our planet’s atmosphere. The debris contains subatomic particles, which are generally unstable and decay quickly into other particles.

cosmic ray in atmosphere

A very high energy proton (red) ejected by the sun enters Earth’s atmosphere. The proton is an example of a cosmic ray. It collides with a particle high in Earth’s atmosphere, producing a shower of subatomic particle debris, which can help reveal some of the basic properties of matter. Image by Mpfiz, modified by this site.

The Cloud Chamber

To study cosmic rays, Anderson designed and built his own cloud chamber – a particle detector containing a supersaturated vapor. When a particle passes through the vapor, it knocks electrons off vapor molecules leaving ions behind. Vapor condenses on these ions, resulting in a trail that can be photographed. Anderson placed an electromagnet around his cloud chamber, which caused charged particles to follow curved trails. By studying a trail, he could deduce the properties of the particle that made it.

Prediction of the Positron

In 1931, Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter.

Paul Dirac“A hole, if there were one, would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron.”

Paul Dirac
Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field, 1931
 

Discovery of the Positron

In 1932, Carl Anderson proved the existence of antimatter experimentally.

Carl Anderson“On August 2, 1932, during the course of photographing cosmic-ray tracks… [tracks] were obtained, which seemed to be interpretable only on the basis of the existence in this case of 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.”

Carl Anderson
The Positive Electron, 1933
 
cloud chamber photo positron

Anderson’s famous cloud chamber photo – a positron’s trail. The trail shows curvature in the opposite direction from the path expected of an electron. The horizontal structure in the middle of the photo is lead plate, which the particle passes through.

Nobel Prize

In 1936, Anderson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the positron. He shared the prize with Victor F. Hess, who discovered cosmic rays in 1912.

The Muon

In 1936, Anderson and his graduate student, Seth Neddermeyer, discovered the muon using the same equipment as Anderson had used to discover the positron. The muon is a subatomic particle with the same negative charge and spin as the electron, but 207 times more massive.

Family and The End

In 1946, age 40, Anderson married Lorraine Bergman. She had been married previously and her son Marshall, who was three, moved into the new family home. Anderson adopted him. Marshall became a mathematician. The couple had a son of their own, David, who became a physicist.

In his spare time, Carl Anderson liked to take his sons fishing, hiking, and to football games.

Anderson retired from Caltech in 1976, age 70.

Carl Anderson died, age 85, on January 11, 1991 at his home in San Marino, California. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Hollywood Hills. His wife Lorraine died in 1984.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
Images digitally enhanced and colorized by this website. © All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Carl Anderson." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 27 Mar. 2018. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/carl-anderson/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading
Carl D. Anderson
The Positive Electron
Phys. Rev. 43, 491, 15 March 1933

Seth H. Neddermeyer and Carl D. Anderson
Note on the Nature of Cosmic-Ray Particles
Phys. Rev. 51, 884, 15 May 1937

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • Paul Dirac
    Paul Dirac
  • Luis Alvarez
    Luis Alvarez
  • Ernest Lawrence
    Ernest Lawrence
  • J. J. Thomson
    J. J. Thomson

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Jan Ingenhousz: Discovered photosynthesis
  • Barry Marshall: Overturned the Medical Establishment
  • Linus Pauling: Maverick Giant of Chemistry
  • William Röntgen: The Discovery of X-rays
  • Howard Florey: Brought penicillin to the world
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Archimedes: A mind beyond his time
  • Stanley Milgram: The infamous Obedience Experiments
  • C. V. Raman: Color change allows harm-free health check of living cells
  • Rosalind Franklin: Shape-shifting DNA
  • Robert Boyle: A new science is born: chemistry
  • Carl Woese: Rewrote Earth’s history of life
  • Alfred Wegener: Shunned after he discovered that continents move
  • Henri Poincaré: Is the solar system stable?
  • Polly Matzinger: The dog whisperer who rewrote our immune system’s rules
  • Otto Guericke: In the 1600s found that space is a vacuum
  • Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water
  • Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world’s most famous codebreaker
  • Evangelista Torricelli: We live at the bottom of a tremendously heavy sea of air
  • Eudoxus: The first mathematical model of the universe
  • James Black: Revolutionized drug design with the Beta-blocker
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Chen-Ning Yang: Shattered a fundamental belief of physicists
  • Robert Hooke: Unveiled the spectacular microscopic world
  • Barbara McClintock: A Nobel Prize after years of rejection
  • Pythagoras: The cult of numbers and the need for proof
  • J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
  • Johannes Kepler: Solved the mystery of the planets
  • Dmitri Mendeleev: Discovered 8 new chemical elements by thinking
  • Maurice Hilleman: Record breaking inventor of over 40 vaccines
  • Marie Curie: Won – uniquely – both the chemistry & physics Nobel Prizes
  • Jacques Cousteau: Marine pioneer, inventor, Oscar winner
  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Perfect Numbers and our Tiny Universe
  • What Happens when the Universe chooses its own Units?
  • Hipparchus and the 2000 Year-Old Clue
  • Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species
  • You Will Die For Showing I’m Wrong!
  • Getting Through Hard Times – The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy
  • Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System
  • Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | James Black | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Eudoxus | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud | Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould | Otto von Guericke

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Alister Hardy | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Jan Ingenhousz | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Barry Marshall | Polly Matzinger | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Henri Poincaré | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2023