Georges Charpak · Science & Medicine
Physicist; invented the multiwire proportional chamber particle detector, Nobel Prize 1992
1924, Dąbrowica, Poland (now Dubrovytsia, Ukraine) — 2010, Paris, France
Poland · France
Georges Charpak is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Physicist; invented the multiwire proportional chamber particle detector, Nobel Prize 1992
Origins and early life
Hersz Georges Charpak was born on 1 August 1924 to Jewish parents, Chana Szapiro and Maurice Charpak, in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland, now Dubrovytsia in Ukraine; the family moved to Paris when he was seven, and he began mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis in 1941. He joined the Resistance, was imprisoned by the Vichy authorities in 1943 and deported in 1944 to Dachau, where he remained until the camp was liberated in 1945.
He entered the École des Mines in Paris that year, became a French citizen in 1946, graduated in 1948, and took a doctorate in nuclear physics at the Collège de France in 1954 in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie.
Work and career
In 1959 he joined CERN. Particle physicists then read their results off photographs: a bubble chamber made tracks, cameras recorded them, and people measured them by hand, a few events an hour. Charpak's multiwire proportional chamber replaced the film with a grid of fine wires, each reading its own signal and sending it straight to a computer, so that a detector could follow a thousand times more events and do it electronically.
It changed how every large experiment is built, and the same principle went into medical imaging, where it cut the X-ray dose a patient receives. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics, alone. He also signed a petition against the Vietnam War in 1972, founded a committee for the imprisoned Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov, and spent his last decades on the reform of science teaching in French primary schools. He died in Paris on 29 September 2010.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Physics
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Physicist; invented the multiwire proportional chamber particle detector, Nobel Prize 1992
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Physics
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