Science Quote by Carl D. Anderson

Anderson writes like a man trying to keep his excitement from leaking onto the page. The sentence is all method and restraint, yet it smuggles in a revolution: by the time you can say “droplets per unit length,” the universe has already given up one of its secrets. In plain terms, he’s describing how cloud-chamber tracks become a ledger of charge. Count the droplets, infer the ionization, and you can tell whether a particle is carrying the fundamental, one-step unit of electric charge. That “great majority” is doing quiet but essential work: it concedes noise, outliers, and experimental mess while still asserting a dominant pattern strong enough to name.

The intent is defensive in the best scientific sense. Anderson isn’t selling wonder; he’s building an argument sturdy enough to survive skeptical peers. The subtext is credentialing: these aren’t vague streaks or photographic curiosities. They’re measurable, repeatable signatures tied to a quantitative standard. Saying both positive and negative particles “possess unit electric charge” also shores up symmetry at a moment when symmetry mattered culturally inside physics - the emerging sense that nature’s bookkeeping has rules, and those rules can be read off instruments.

Context matters: Anderson’s era is the golden age of cosmic-ray physics, when new particles were arriving first as anomalies in emulsions and chambers, then as entries in the particle zoo. This line is part of the pivot from “we saw something strange” to “we have characterized it,” the rhetorical move that turns a discovery into a fact.