The work for which Donald Glaser is best known, his bubble chamber invention for tracking the movement of high-energy particles, is said to have begun over a glass of beer. In the early 1950s, while teaching physics at the University of Michigan, Glaser followed a hunch that bubbles rising from a glass of beer might provide a clue for detecting high-energy radiation. Although his first attempt to prove this hypothesis, using beer, soda water, and ginger ale, failed, he kept working. In 1953 he created a small bubble chamber filled with superheated ether that was successful in capturing the trail of bubbles left by nuclear particles as they passed through the liquid. The bubble chamber invention won Glaser the 1960 Nobel Prize in physics and was a vital step in understanding atomic function. It also enabled the discovery of new atomic particles, such as the rho and omega minus particles...