Droplets to Digital: How Particle Detection Grew from a Glass Box into a Global Science
The journey from a hand-built cloud chamber sitting on a laboratory bench to the cathedral-sized detectors buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border spans roughly a century of ingenuity, frustration, and physical insight. Understanding that progression reveals not only how technology advances, but why the foundational logic of the earliest detectors still shapes how physicists teach and think about particle behavior today.