Timeblog.net

In an old tale, Gargamelle is the mother of Gargantua, a giant. In Physics, Gargamelle was the very appropriate name for a giant of a machine: The mother of all bubble chambers, as this article states.
A bubble chamber works like this: You fill it with a liquid and heat the liquid to the point where it would boil, but if you take a very clean liquid, there will be no nuclei for bubbles to form. You usually heat the liquid to just below the boiling point, lower the pressure, thus creating a superheated fluid. The passing of a particle you want to detect then creatres a string of bubbles that gets photographed. Magnetic fields will cause charged particles to creatre curved bubble strings. If you calculated all the particles, you can retrace what was the initial particle.

The gigantic Gargamelle was built at the end of the 1960s at CERN to detect Neutrinos. You can’t see them, but if one happens to react inside the chamber, you will see a bubble string starting inside the chamber from out of nowhere. The final chamber was a cylinder, 4.8 m long and 1.85 m wide, with a volume of 12 cubic metres.
In 1973, with the help of Gargamelle, it was proven that in weak interactions (the weak force, fourth of the natural forces and the most peculiar, but important enough that is causes radioactive decay!) there are three exchange particles. You know the electromagnetic force, its echange particle is the photon. Weak force had two charged particles, W-Bosons. A neutral current Z-boson was predicted, and found in neutrino interactions with Gargamelle in 1973. The most peculiar thing is - photons are massless as long as they don’t move, W- and Z-bosons aren’t. Why? We don’t know yet, but maybe again CERN will bring the answer, with the Large Hadron collider starting next year!
Today, Gargamelle is out of commission and positioned at CERN like some strange art object: