1959 Nobelmen

This year's Nobel Prize in physics (worth $42,606) went last week to two professors of the University of California at Berkeley, Emilio Segre, 54, and Owen Chamberlain, 39. In 1955 they headed a team that found the long-sought antiprotons, key particles of the stranger-than-fiction world of antimatter (TIME, Oct. 31, 1955 et seq.). Antiprotons, which the Segre-Chamberlain team identified in a beam of subatomic debris created by Berkeley's 6.2-billion-volt bevatron, have the mass of ordinary protons but carry negative electric charges instead of positive charges. When a proton hits an antiproton, they annihilate each other, both turning into a powerful flash of gamma-ray energy.

Dr. Chamberlain was born in San Francisco, is on leave this school season to lecture at Harvard. Dr. Segre, an associate of the great Enrico Fermi, was born in Tivoli, Italy. Like Fermi, he came to the U.S. before World War II because of disgust with Italian Fascism. Both he and Dr. Chamberlain worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb, and Chamberlain helped explode the first test bomb at Alamogordo in 1945.

Nobel Prize for chemistry went to Professor Jaroslav Heyrovsky, 68, of Charles University, Prague, the first Czechoslovak to win a Nobel Prize. The award came as much-belated recognition for his discovery of polarography, a delicate electrical method of chemical analysis. It works by measuring the properties of ions, and can detect slight traces of metals in a drop or two of a complex solution. Discovered in 1925, polarography is still used all over the world by analytical chemists.

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