Brazilian scientist César Lattes received, this Thursday (11), a tribute from Google, which included his photo and an animated illustration of atoms on its search page. The honor was given on the day the physicist would have turned 100 years old if he were alive.
He was born in Curitiba, on July 11, 1924, and made a career in science to become one of the biggest names in Brazil and give his name to the platform that brings together the academic history of all scientists and researchers in Brazil, Lattes. He was one of those responsible for the study of mesons from Pará, which earned Cecil Powell, head of the laboratory where he worked, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950.
César Lattes began his career in science at home, as reported by the Brazilian Physics Society. His father owned a bank in Turin, Italy, and financed the Ukrainian physicist Gleb Wataghin, with whom Lattes became close at a young age. In 1943, at the age of 19, the young man entered the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters (FFCL) at the University of São Paulo (USP), where Wataghin worked, to study physics.
There, the Brazilian researched cosmic rays and, according to the USP Institute of Physics collection, he was invited by professor Giuseppe Occhialini to work in Cecil Powell’s laboratory at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. He worked on developing a particle detector that improved common photographic plates, which led him to operate a particle accelerator at the University of Cambridge.
With freedom to research and curiosity, Lattes began the path that would lead to the development of atomic physics in Brazil. It was at his request that Occhialini carried out an experiment during a skiing trip to France in 1946 and documented, for the first time, the existence of mesons, subatomic particles whose existence had not yet been recorded by science. What was observed in the French Pyrenees instigated an even more accurate observation, made on Mount Chacaltaya, in Bolivia, and culminated in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Cecil Powell, who headed the laboratory where Lattes worked, in 1950.
In 1947, to continue his research, Lattes went to work at the University of Berkeley, in the United States, with physicist Eugene Gardner, who had won a Nobel Prize in 1939. His mission, then, was to use a powerful particle accelerator from the laboratory of physicist and artificially produce mesons. At the end of his scholarship, he refused an invitation to work at Harvard, also in North American territory, and chose to return to Brazil and develop national physics, as he revealed in an interview with Ciência Hoje magazine, an excerpt of which was reproduced by the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo (Alesp).
“We thought about improving Brazil”, said Lattes, who received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from USP at the age of 23, in 1948.
In Brazil, the physicist was one of the creators and director of the Brazilian Center for Physical Research and taught classes at USP, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). In one of his works, Lattes worked with Japanese scientists to study “fireballs”, a phenomenon that is supposed to be a cloud of mesons. To achieve this feat, he led the implementation of chambers exposed to cosmic rays on Mount Chacaltaya, where the Cosmic Physics Laboratory of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, in Bolivia, now operates.
The physicist died of bladder cancer and pulmonary edema, aged 79, at Hospital das Clínicas, in Campinas, in the interior of São Paulo, as reported on the Alesp website at the time.
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