Dr Georges Charpak, physicist. Born: 8 March, 1924, in Ukraine. Died: 29 September, 2010, in Paris, aged 86

Particle accelerators, popularly known as atom smashers, whip sub-nuclear 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 behaviour have been principal goals of modern high-energy physics.

With his invention, the multiwire proportional tracking chamber, 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 also earned Nobels for their inventors) depended on taking photographs of the tracks left by particles as they emerged from collisions.

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.

The invention meant that hundreds of millions of particles a second could be sensed, evaluated and recorded. It allowed scientists testing theories to search out the one particle in a billion for which they were hunting.

Two Nobel Prizes were awarded for identifying sub-atomic phenomena using Charpak's device before he received his. Variants of the device now contribute to the Large Hadron Collider put into operation this year at Cern, in Geneva, where Charpak worked for decades. That project aims to explain the origins of the universe.

Leon Lederman, Charpak's former boss at Cern and a winner of the Nobel physics award himself, said in 1992 that Charpak's instrument worked by very indirect means. "No one's ever seen an atom, really," he said. Accordingly, he said, Charpak measured the infinitesimal electric impulses that particles leave as they race through one of his devices. Dr Lederman compared the phenomenon to hearing a noise in the sky and looking up to see a vapour trail, then reasoning that an aeroplane had passed.

Charpak was born in a village in Poland that is now in Ukraine. The family moved to Paris in 1932 when he was seven. After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, his family refused to wear the yellow star the Nazis demanded Jews wear. They obtained false identity papers under the name Charpentier.
As a teenager, Charpak became active in the French Resistance and was imprisoned by the pro-Nazi French government in 1943. In 1944, he was transferred to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. In an article he wrote in 1994, he said that at

the first camp, in France, prisoners took two spoonfuls of the thin broth they received to give to "the weakest and sickest among us". He wrote: "It was a gesture that gave us a sense of great dignity."

After the war, Charpak became a French citizen and got a degree in mining engineering from the École des Mines, then a PhD from the Collège de France. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

He joined Cern in 1959 and stayed until his retirement in 1991. He was part of a team that in 1961 determined that a particle known as the muon was not a separate particle of the nucleus, but just a heavy electron. In an interview in 2009, he called this his proudest accomplishment. In 1968, he invented the multiwire proportional tracking chamber.

After winning the Nobel Prize, Charpak tried to apply its principles in biology and medicine. One of his first projects was to study electrical impulses in rats' brains.

His research led to the development of a camera used by Nasa to monitor astronauts' hearts. He developed an X-ray machine that uses one-tenth the radiation of a conventional X-ray. He also worked on ways to reprogramme cancerous cells so they would no longer be malignant.

Charpak, who had earlier investigated using radiation to find subterranean minerals, recently developed a radon detector to help predict earthquakes. He was a strong advocate of nuclear power, which provides more than three-quarters of France's electricity.

When he became alarmed that only 3 per cent of French primary schools introduced their students to science, he started a programme in 1996 to encourage students to learn by doing their own scientific experiments. It spread to 12 other countries.

In 2004, Charpak and Henri Broch wrote a jaunty, sardonic book titled Debunked, deriding ESP, telekinesis, Ouija boards and other phenomena they regarded as pseudoscience. They said astrology was inaccurate because the earth's axis shifts, making heavenly signs inherently imprecise.

Asked what he planned to do with his prize money in 1992, Charpak absentmindedly replied that he had hoped to buy a pair of shoes that afternoon, but guessed he would not have time. He soon received gifts of shoes from all over the globe.

"Georges Charpak was an innovative, humanist thinker. He made an immense contribution to research in France and worldwide," comments CNRS president Alain Fuchs. "His work revolutionized subatomic physics and opened the way to the digital age. His invention of multiwire chambers, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1992, was the precursor of the detectors used today in fundamental physics, without which many discoveries would not have been possible. It also paved the way for the development of a number of major applications and advances, particularly in the field of medical imaging."

For Jacques Martino, director of CNRS's National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3), "Georges Charpak led a prodigious life. He became a Resistance fighter and studied with Frédéric Joliot-Curie. His loss means a page of history is turned. On behalf of the IN2P3 and CNRS, I wish to pay my respects to this enlightened, creative mind, who inspired and will continue to inspire many generations of researchers."

Georges Charpak was born in Dabrovika, Poland on March 8, 1924. He arrived in France in 1931 and joined the Resistance in 1942 but he was arrested and deported to Dachau. He returned to France after the war and became a French citizen in 1946. After graduating from the École des Mines engineering school in Paris, he joined CNRS in 1948 to work at the Collège de France nuclear physics laboratory, headed by his former professor Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Charpak earned his Ph.D. in 1954. In 1959, he went to work for CERN in Geneva, where he focused on the development of new techniques for particle physics detectors. This led him to invent, in 1968, the "multiwire proportional chamber", an instrument that would revolutionize particle detection, bringing it into the electronic age. In 1992, he won the Nobel Prize in physics for this invention, which is now widely used as the basis for modern-day particle detectors. His discovery found many important applications, especially in medicine. Charpak's work led to significant improvements in medical radiography, making it possible to reduce patients' exposure to radiation.

Georges Charpak was also a tireless teacher. Co-founder of the "La Main à la Pâte" ("Hands On") movement, an educational program to promote experimental sciences in elementary schools, he was always deeply committed to education, sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm with the younger generations.

Voyager - the space explorers that are still boldly going to the stars

Nasa's two Voyager ships have reached the edge of the solar system – and their incredible 35-year journey is far from over

• 
  Dallas Campbell and Christopher Riley
  
• 
  The Observer, Sunday 21 October 2012
  

Voyager 2 passed Jupiter in 1979. Ten years later, after observing Neptune, it began its journey out of the solar system. Composite: BBC2

The year 1977 was an important one for music. Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks were released. Elvis left the building for the last time, dying at the age of only 42. But amid all this rock'n'roll history another less celebrated but far more significant album was quietly being made.

Fashioned from copper rather than vinyl, and plated with gold for longevity, The Sounds Of Earth was compiled by the American astronomer Carl Sagan. It was a broader range of music than most of the other albums released that year, aiming to encapsulate 5,000 years of human culture; from an Australian Aborigine song and an Indian raga to Azerbaijani bagpipes, bamboo flutes, Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry.

Like any compilation album, each piece was carefully selected and its merit, to make the cut, hotly debated. But unlike most other records, only two copies were made. They were placed inside their aluminium album covers, complete with artwork in the form of a "clear", universally understandable, pictorial depiction of what they were and instructions for how to play them. A stylus was also included, to help any creatures that might chance upon them in the future to hear the music and other recordings. In a scene that would not have been out of place in Ridley Scott's recent Prometheus, they were then carefully bolted to the outside of the two Voyager spacecraft, by the last human beings ever to touch them.

The records sit on one face of each craft's 10-sided "chassis" or bus, above which sits the large, white 3.7-metre wide communications dish, which dominates the structure. Protruding, insect-like, from the craft are "limbs" and antennae. The radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which power the Voyagers in the darkest reaches of the outer solar system, stretch out to on one side, just below a proboscis-like, 13m-long magnetometer boom. Across the other side of the craft, another broad arm juts out. It carries Voyager's "eyes" – an array of cameras, spectrometers, particle detectors and other equipment.

The challenge for Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab, which designed and constructed the Voyagers, was to build a craft that could survive in space for years. In the early 1970s, when the JPL team began the project, they'd never built a craft rated for longer than a few months of interplanetary travel. It was a big jump to create something that would reach the outer planets, and perhaps even farther.

"At that point in time, that was a mind-blowing thought," says Voyager systems engineer John Casani. "How you build a spacecraft that can survive failures and still keep on chugging. We thought we could do it. Nobody else did!"

Half a decade of back-breaking building and testing followed, to create a craft which was up to the job. As the build was nearing completion Casani decided to do something unique, to celebrate the sacrifices of his 2,000-strong engineering team and their families had made. During an open house party held to mark the end of Voyager's design phase, he invited everyone there to sign their names on large sheets of paper. He then had these papers reduced and reproduced onto six small metal plaques, still large enough to read the individual names. These were then stitched into the thermal blankets inside the main spacecraft bus, as a memorial to those whose ingenuity, skill and support had made these unique machines possible.

With these signatures and their golden records on board, the twin spacecraft were launched in late summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral and placed on a "grand tour" trajectory that would carry them on fleeting, but historic fly-bys of Jupiter and its moons, and then on to Saturn and its rings. Deflected towards Saturn's moon Titan, Voyager 1 would head out of the plane of the solar system and off in the direction of the northern constellation of Camelopardalis.

Voyager 2 would carry on towards an encounter with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, which would accelerate it to more than 50,000mph and hurl it in the direction of the brightest star in our sky – Sirius.

On the course of this journey past the giant planets, the craft returned more than 67,000 photographs – among them stunning images of worlds we hadn't even dreamt of. As Voyager's chief scientist Ed Stone put it as they flew past Saturn: "Our imaginations were not nearly up to what nature provided." The pictures have challenged our understanding of meteorology and geology – redefining our understanding of the solar system and of planetary science as a discipline.

These were places that we had only known as fuzzy pinpricks of light seen through telescopes from Earth before Voyager. These two spacecraft on the grandest of grand tours have taught us more about the outer solar system in the last 35 years than in all of human history. It was, and still is mankind's greatest voyage of discovery. But it is perhaps appropriate that the final image captured by Voyager, the image for which the mission is best remembered, was of ourselves.

On Valentine's Day 1990 Voyager 1 was instructed to turn its cameras around to snap a final family portrait of as many of the planets as possible, seen uniquely from 6bn km above the solar system. The imaging team knew that, from this distance, each planet would occupy less than a pixel.

It would be the farthest picture ever taken of home, capturing us as a single speck – an almost invisible point in the black ocean of space. At first when the photograph was printed, Earth was mistaken as a speck of dust which Voyager scientists initially tried to brush off the glossy print! But this visually underwhelming image of Earth – a "pale blue dot" as Sagan described it – was as profound as the spectacular whole Earth images captured by the Apollo astronauts some 20 years before.

Not long after taking this final picture, Voyager 1 passed the orbit of Pluto, and by the end of 2004 had entered the realm of the Kuiper belt – a band of dark, Pluto-like worlds of rock and ice orbiting the Sun, almost imperceptibly far away. Voyager 2 reached this domain shortly afterwards. Today the two spacecraft still continue to hurtle away from us at 16km per second.

Thirty five years after leaving Earth, and now 18bn km from home, Voyager 1 is entering the "bow shock" - a region of space marking the boundary between the solar and the galactic winds – the edge of the Sun's influence. Voyager 2 has also encountered this frontier, as each craft prepares to enter the region astronomers call "interstellar space".

Five instruments on each craft are still functioning, reporting back the nature of this new environment into which we have extended our senses; characterising the new magnetic fields and galactic particles they are now in contact with.

Their public voice also continues to reach us from this distance. Despite being technologically frozen in the 1970s, the Voyagers have managed to embrace the digital age – now harnessing Twitter to communicate their story. When a Twitter follower asked 'what could Voyager 2 see?' it replied in fitting Sagan-esque prose: "I can sense stars and their whispers amid the roaring of our own sun".

Although they don't tweet every day, both craft still maintain daily contact with the Earth. Even travelling at the speed of light their messages take quite a long time to reach home. "The journey time is now about 15 hours each way," says Voyager's current manager Suzanne Dodd. "We sent a command Saturday morning and it came back Sunday afternoon." Dodd has been with Voyager since the mid-1980s, and likens keeping in touch with the spacecraft to the nurturing of an elderly senior citizen. "Sometimes they need a bit of tuning on their hearing!"

It's not just the Voyagers that are ageing. Everyone on the team has lived out their lives against the backdrop of their mission. "When I started on Voyager my two daughters were young," says Ed Stone, who has been on board since day one. "By the time they were in college we had passed Saturn and were on our way to Uranus. They got married and the Voyagers just kept going, and we had grandchildren and Voyager just kept going and our grandchildren are now aware of what's happening to the Voyagers just like our children were."

Barring any serious engineering failures, the Voyagers will both continue to report from interstellar space until around 2025, when declining power and propellant required to point their communication dishes towards Earth will gradually prevent them from calling home.

Were it not for these diminishing consumables, and the risk of losing their lock on the increasingly dim and distant Sun, Nasa could track them for another century or two.

But even without power the two Voyagers will continue to serve us. In the largely empty, benign environment of interstellar space, these craft are likely to last for millions of years. They will outlive the pyramids, they're likely to outlive us, and perhaps even the Earth itself; the only record of our existence, circling the galaxy for ever. If other intelligent, technological creatures ever find them, as they drift for eons in deep space, the craft will reveal something about the beings that built them. Our size and dexterity can be inferred from their scale. Their engineering sophistication will tell these creatures something about our technological and mathematical abilities, at least as they were in the 1970s. But the Voyagers' design alone will tell them nothing about what kind of creatures we really were.

So while the team at the Jet Propulsion Lab put the finishing touches to the Voyagers in early 1977, spacecraft engineer John Casani suggested to Carl Sagan that they include something on board each craft that would address this. Sagan reasoned that music might be the best way of communicating to other creatures something more about us. "Could the meaning of music be understood by something else," Sagan wondered. "The soaring emotions from music might be a mystery to them, but if we were to convey something of what humans were about then music has to be a part of it," he later recalled in an interview with BBC Radio 4.

Sagan quickly pitched the idea for the golden records, estimating it would cost $25,000 to make them. Casani agreed and Sagan and team member Ann Druyan set about choosing the music. They had just six weeks to assemble the album, the most symbolic music compilation project in history. It was an almost impossible task, by Sagan's own admission.

A frantic consultation with musicologists around the world ensued, as Druyan, who later became Sagan's wife, battled to track down 26 specific recordings, which reflected something of the emergence and evolution of music on Earth.

When the physician and biology writer Lewis Thomas was asked which tracks he would send he quickly replied 'the complete works of JS Bach …" before adding, after a pause " … But that would be boasting!" But The Sounds of Earth does carry more from Bach than any other single composer, with three pieces chosen to reflect the evolution of his style.

As with any mixtape project, particularly one intended to represent something of our diversity as a species and what it means to be a human, there are going to be some obvious omissions; not least the Beatles. Druyan was hoping for Here Comes the Sun but the request was turned down by the band's record company, as they presumably couldn't agree to clearance for the rights "in perpetuity, across the known Universe".

But the most striking story from this effort to compile the golden record concerns the closing piece for the album; Beethoven's Cavatina from the String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Op 130. Whilst researching an article about the project for the New York Times, Druyan had looked at Beethoven's diaries, and: "in his own hand he'd written: 'will they like my music on Venus? What will they think of it on Uranus…" At last, a way to respond to that impulse, that question that Beethoven asked so long ago, she felt.

Despite its ambition, and the epic time scales over which the Voyagers are likely to survive, given the vastness of space, these two tiny craft and their golden records are unlikely ever to be found. But Sagan was clever enough to realise this. For him it wasn't so much what the records said to other civilisations that mattered, but more significant was what they said about our own. Like the pale blue dot photograph captured by Voyager 1, the compilation record was a mirror to hold up to ourselves.

"Here is a moment when we have to suddenly think what is it about our culture we'd want others to know about, that we'd be proud of," Sagan reflected in a 1982 interview. "The record should represent the human species as an entirety. We are a single species on the planet Earth. The unity of the species seen down here is a fact that is essential for the human future."

As our first interstellar ambassadors set sail on this new sea, it's worth reflecting once more on this unique vantage point which such exploration, far beyond our "pale blue dot" offers us. From such a perspective national boundaries melt away and ethnic, religious or ideological differences seem an irrelevant way to define our identity.

In the summer of 1977 the launching of our collective message in a bottle into the cosmic ocean was a highly optimistic gesture, which briefly put all our tribal differences aside. This optimism is perhaps best summed up by one of the voice recordings it carries. "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."

Oct 9th 2003

Baroness Greenfield is acutely aware of the perils of futurology. Visions from the 1950s of a world in which robots performed the domestic chores, meals were taken as pills and we zoomed around in personal helicopters were touchingly wide of the mark. Critically, nobody from that era foresaw the rise and ubiquity of the computer. Thomas Watson, the legendary boss of IBM, once famously predicted that there might turn out to be a world market for just five computers.

In Baroness Greenfield's vision of the future there is no dividing line between the real and the virtual, and most of our experiences are shaped either by a souped-up version of the internet or by smart drugs. We will rarely have to leave our homes, which will become an extension of our minds and bodies. Entertainment will be on tap to match our moods, while our physical environment, from the view through our windows to the shape of our rooms and the furniture inside them, will have the protean ability to adapt itself to our desires and needs. There will be no cancer or baldness or obesity. Nano-machines inside our bodies will change our appearance at will. Our bodily functions will be monitored and any incipient malfunctions dealt with by clothes that both dispense drugs and have the happy knack of cleaning themselves.

Relationships with other human beings will increasingly become too troublesome and unrewarding compared with the more immediate satisfactions to be had from the ever-present networked screens. We will be able to have sex virtually with anyone, while reproduction will be possible at any stage of our lives and regardless of our sexuality.

By Susan Greenfield.

They have mapped the infinity of space, developed spray-on skin for burns victims, pioneered cancer-beating therapies, created cutting-edge computer chips, discovered the first radio pulsars, and won Nobel prizes. But female science professors are still being asked to make the tea and take notes at meetings by their - often junior - male colleagues. Sexism remains all too prevalent in Britain's scientific community, according to some of its leading figures, even as The Royal Society unveils a list of the 10 greatest women scientists in British history. Women scientists this weekend called for government funding to be ring-fenced for projects headed by women, and men who are principal child carers, to help them get ahead in what remains a male-dominated profession. "If you are on high-level committees, you'll be asked to make the tea," said Professor Athene Donald, the deputy head of physics at Cambridge University. "Recently, on a committee, the chairman thought I was the secretary. And I've been in committees where we've been addressed as "gentlemen", despite the fact that there are women there. It is very off-putting."

Baroness Greenfield, who is suing the Royal Institution after it ousted her as its director in January, has criticised the Government for failing to provide enough financial support for women trying to make a career in the sector. "However much people support and encourage women, it has got to be backed by resources. The Government has never really delivered that," said Lady Greenfield. "I hope that the election campaign addresses this. What is needed is about £50,000 a year per woman, and then add the cost of equipment, and you are looking at £200,000 for one person. Science research is expensive." Lady Greenfield also argues that the insecure nature of science research puts women at a disadvantage: most scientists have to make do with temporary research contracts until they secure a fixed position in their thirties and forties; maternity leave provision is limited; and, for those in cutting-edge research, a career break at that stage can leave them way behind their male peers. "Many people won't have security of tenure until they are in their thirties. It is one of the few employment cultures with no security," she said.

It is thought that the subject's "nerdy" image puts girls off studying science beyond GCSE, and the sector also struggles to retain female graduates, with more than 70 per cent of women science graduates deciding on non-science related careers. One of the aims of the Government's 10-year strategy on science and technology, launched in 2004, was to encourage more women into the sectors. "The science and technology professions have been built by men, for men," said Annette Williams, the director of the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. The centre was established in 2004 to address the gender imbalance by using mentoring, training and networking. "Often, women can find the climate quite hostile. And science and technology are so male-dominated that they are behind other sectors in terms of things like flexible working," said Ms Williams.

The Royal Society, which did not allow female fellows to join until 1945, is using its 350th anniversary year to highlight the work of women scientists, such as Rosalind Franklin, whose work on DNA led directly to the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, and Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel prize-winner for chemistry. Despite the negative experiences of many female scientists, some believe that the situation is improving. "The number of women science professors rose from 8 per cent of the total in 2004 to 11 per cent now. I think we had something to do with that," said Ms Williams. While women may be under-represented in science, few are in favour of "quotas" of jobs being reserved for women. "Affirmative action can be very damaging. Women don't want to be appointed because they are women, they want to be appointed because they are good," said Professor Donald. "But if you advertise a job, you should have a proper search, and encourage women to come forward, not just appoint someone you know."

The Royal Society Top 10