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[Jonathan]

He passed away last week.

He won the 1992 Nobel peace prize for his invention contribution to nuclear particle research.

"Particle accelerators, popularly known as atom smashers, whip subnuclear particles like protons and electrons to high speeds and then force them to collide. The collisions generate a storm of particles flying in many directions. Some of these short-lived particles have not existed since the Big Bang created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago, and identifying them and charting their behavior have been principal goals of modern high-energy physics.

With his invention, the multiwire proportional tracking chamber, Dr. Charpak vastly improved the ability of physicists to measure and record what goes on inside particle accelerators. Earlier detectors, like the cloud chamber and bubble chamber (which, too, earned Nobels for their inventors) depended on taking photographs of the tracks left by particles as they emerged from collisions.

Dr. Charpak’s chamber, by contrast, used many minuscule wires to capture electric pulses, thus generating vastly more information. The data was instantaneously fed into a computer for interpretation. No longer did scientists have to scan thousands of photographs."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/science/03charpak.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

[MYK]

He won the 1992 Nobel peace physics prize for his invention contribution to nuclear particle research.