Abstract
By 1933, the class of generally accepted elementary particles comprised the electron, the photon, the proton as well as newcomers in the shape of the neutron, the positron, and the neutrino. During the following decade, a new and poorly understood particle, the mesotron or meson, was added to the list. By paying close attention to the names of these and other particles and to the sometimes controversial proposals of names, a novel perspective on this well-researched line of development is offered. Part of the study investigates the circumstances around the coining of “positron” as an alternative to “positive electron.” Another and central part is concerned with the many names associated with the discovery of what in the late 1930s was generally called the “mesotron” but eventually became known as the “meson” and later again the muon and pion. The naming of particles in the period up to the early 1950s was more than just a matter of agreeing on convenient terms, it also reflected different conceptions of the particles and in some cases the uncertainty regarding their nature and relations to existing theories. Was the particle discovered in the cosmic rays the same as the one responsible for the nuclear forces? While two different names might just be synonymous referents, they might also refer to widely different conceptual images.
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Source: Rosenfeld Papers, Niels Bohr Archive
Source: Cronin 2011, p. 198
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Notes
The two names, honoring Satyendra N. Bose and Enrico Fermi, respectively, were coined by Paul Dirac in 1945. See Walker and Slack 1980, and Kragh (1990a, p. 36). The name “yukon” referring to Hideki Yukawa was occasionally used for the meson, but mostly informally and only for a brief period of time (Sect. 6.4).
Remarkably, in his famous book Les Atomes published in 1913, Jean Perrin, the later Nobel laureate, avoided the term electron and instead wrote of either corpuscles or, more frequently, “atoms of electricity”.
As Klaus Hentschel (2018, p. 33) points out, “it is plain wrong to identify G. N. Lewis as the one to have designated the term ‘photon’ to Einstein’s notion of the light quantum, as alleged in about 99% of all texts treating the subject”.
The British chemist and physician William Prout suggested in 1815 what is known as Prout’s hypothesis, namely that for any element x the atomic weight could be stated as a multiple of hydrogen’s weight, that is, \({A}_{\mathrm{x}}=n{A}_{\mathrm{H}}\) with n = 1, 2, 3, … (Brock 1985).
In the original German: “Neutron, es schwankt heran / Masse, sie lastet dran / Ladung, sie is vertan / Pauli, er glaubt daran!“
Science 62 (1925): 461–462 promoted the name “Millikan rays.” Although Millikan did not use it himself, neither did he protest. For details on the controversy, see De Maria, Ianniello, and Russo 1991. The first time that “cosmic rays” appeared in the title of a scientific communication may have been in Wright (1926) published 9 January 1926.
American Institute of Physics (AIP) oral history interview conducted by Charles Weiner on 30 June 1966: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4487
AIP interview, C. Weiner with W. Furry, 9 August 1971. See also Monk (2012, p. 208): “It would not be until the summer of the following year [1934] that Oppenheimer resigned to the word ‘positron’, which he regarded as a barbaric mixture of Latin (posi-) and Greek (-tron)”.
See also a letter by M. L. Glaser to the editor, American Journal of Physics 82, January 2014: 6, which quotes from Reuterdahl’s 1923 publication.
The “magnon” of solid-state physics, so named by Landau around 1940, is an entirely different concept. See Walker and Slack (1970). The “magneton” introduced by Pierre Weiss in 1911 was a unit of magnetic moment, although initially also discussed as a kind of magnetic elementary particle. The British physicist Samuel McLaren suggested that the magneton was the magnetic analogue to the electron (Hendry 1983).
The two unpublished letters are reproduced in Kawabe (1988).
Bohr to Klein, 13 January 1938, Bohr Scientific Correspondence (BSC), Niels Bohr Archive (NBA), Copenhagen.
Anderson and Anderson (1983, p. 118); Weiss (1999, p. 74). See also Charles Weiner’s interview with Anderson of 30 June 1966, https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4487: “I think the word ‘mesoton’ might have stuck. Nobody liked mesotron. It’s as bad as positron, I guess.”.
Kemmer (1965, p. 605). Egon Bretscher was a Swiss-British chemist who in the late 1930s switched to nuclear physics and later specialized in applied atomic energy.
Munns (2017) details the modern scientific use of the suffix -tron not only in physics but also in plant biology and other pure and applied sciences. As the author points out, there is no connection between the instruments ending with this suffix and the particles which happen to share the suffix.
In Spanish “meson” may refer to an inn or boarding house, an appellation common also in Mexico and the South-West of the United States. Brode and Swann were both sympathetic to Millikan’s proposal and among the last physicists to use “mesotron” in their papers. See Brode (1949) and Seymour and Swann (1954).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson. Spradley (1985, p. 567); Capri (2007, p. 12).
“Dynatron” was at the time well known as the name for a vacuum tube oscillator circuit used in radio technology and scientific instruments. It was invented by the physicist Albert Hull at General Electric in 1918.
Monaldi (2008, p. 366) accepts Millikan’s note as proof that Bohr proposed the yukon at the meeting of the British Association.
Bohr’s article with the same title for the 1939 yearbook, and with manuscript dated 19 January 1939, did not refer to the two words. On the other hand, it mentioned “a new kind of particle, the so-called ‘meson’.” It also referred to the very recent discovery of uranium fission, if not with the word “fission” which had not yet appeared in print. It only did so in a paper by Lise Meitner and Robert Frisch published in Nature on 11 February.
Bohr to Millikan, 9 April 1941, BSC. In an unsent draft version of the letter, Bohr wrote that the criticism of the philological authorities “rests entirely on the last syllable, which is felt as unduly stressing the relationship to the word electron.” Bohr’s interest in the terminology of new elementary particles seems to have been unrelated to his more general and philosophical ideas about ordinary language as a precondition for unambiguous communication (Favrholdt 1993).
Interview with Christian Møller, Copenhagen, 26 August 1971. https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4783-2
“The Cracow cosmic ray conference,” Science 107 (1948): 60–61. The Cracow conference was not truly international as more than two-thirds of the participants were Polish scientists. With the single exception of John Wheeler, who prepared the report, they were all European. They included specialists in cosmic ray research such as P. Auger, L. Leprince-Ringuet, P. Blackett, W. Heitler, C. Powell, N. Arley, L. Janossy, and G. Bernadini.
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Kragh, H. A terminological history of early elementary particle physics. Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 77, 73–120 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00407-022-00299-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00407-022-00299-2