On the antiproton discovery.

My plans at Brookhaven Cosmic-ray physicists had been dreaming of observing antiprotons long before the construction of the Bevatron. In fact, some events that could be interpreted as revealing antiprotons had already been observed in cloud chambers and in photographic emulsions, but the indications were not compelling. Being a cosmic-ray physicist, I shared that “antimatter rush” when I was at Brookhaven working with the Cosmotron. At the Brookhaven cafeteria, discussing antiprotons was the order of the day. Hartland Snyder and Maurice Goldhaber bet $400 on whether or not the antiproton existed. Goldhaber lost. In contrast to this, physicists from Berkeley had hardly any interest in antiprotons. They considered the wish to discover the antiprotons unoriginal, if not naive. After all, the energy of the Bevatron was the bare minimum for the production of antiprotons, and no one could be confident about it. Moreover, the hot subjects at the time were the strange particles (copiously produced by the Bevatron), which had opened a field of physics monopolizing the attention of the theorists, with the K⁰, K₁ and K₂ quartet, and the experiments that enabled T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang to perceive the parity violation. Even as late as December 1954, there was so little interest in the antiproton that at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Berkeley no one presented a paper speculating on its discovery. However, I thought that even a slight chance of finding antimatter justified a great effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]