Happy birthday Cesar Lattes, Brazilian physicist who was born #OTD 100 years ago!
He became well-known for his work on cosmic rays. In 1947, while working at the University of Bristol in England with Cecil Powell & Giuseppe Occhialini, he played a crucial role in the discovery of the pion. He also contributed to the early development of the CERN. Lattes worked extensively in Brazil, particularly at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas.
Although Lattes was the main researcher and first author of the historic Nature article describing the pi meson, Cecil Powell was the only person awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950 for his development of a photographic method for studying nuclear processes and his discovery that led to the discovery of mesons. The reason for this apparent neglect is the policy of the Nobel Committee, which until 1960 was to reward only the leader of the research group.
