Notes on the history of nuclear physics

The March 2013 article by Joseph Reader and Charles Clark credited Carl Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer for discovery of the muon in March 1937, without mentioning the independent, complementary, and only slightly later report by Curry Street and Edward Stevenson the next month. That the two groups used different techniques makes the combined result much more robust than if only a single experiment had been done. The two efforts are discussed in detail by Peter Galison in his book How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

The authors also at best oversimplify when they say that Anderson “beat to the punch” Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini in the discovery of the positron. In fact, on the one hand, the latter work was several months later, so the suggestion of a race with one winner is hardly fair, but on the other hand, Blackett and Occhialini were able to detect pair creation of electron and positron together and thus verified directly that the positron is the antiparticle of the electron. That history is discussed beautifully by Norwood Russell Hanson in The Concept of the Positron: A Philosophical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2010, originally published in 1963).