The discovery of solid-state nuclear tracksdA personal memoir from 1956–1959

摘要

Since March 2007, when quite by chance I discovered that the International Nuclear Tracks Society had at their Barcelona Meeting in July 2004 acknowledged me as a founding father of the field, it has been my resolve to express my gratitude on a suitable occasion in the form of a memoir in the pages of Radiation Measurements of events attending the discovery of nuclear tracks, with a brief critical assessment of the Note published in Nature in 1958 (Young, 1958a). Such an occasion arose in May 2008, the 50th anniversary of the original Harwell Report on Etching of Radiation Damage in Lithium Fluoridedand the 80th of my birth!