Bibha Chowdhuri and Debendra Mohan Bose
By the 1940s Anderson and Neddermeyer’s discoveries had proven that looking at the heavens was a very effective way to find new particles. At the same time, Hideki Yukawa’s theory was still looking for a particle that carried the strong nuclear force. The first true meson, which proved Hideki Yukawa’s theory, was observed from cosmic radiation in 1941 at the Bose Institute (India) by Bibha Chowdhuri and Debendra Mohan Bose. It was identified as a pi meson, or a pion. Then, over the next few years, more and more meson were discovered. They began calling them after Greek letters: the kaon, the eta (η) and eta-prime (η') mesons; the rho (ρ), omega (ω), phi (φ) mesons… and of course there were possibilities of these having anti-matter counterparts. Everything became very messy and difficult to classify; Physicists disparagingly began to call it the particle zoo.
Source: Bose, d., Choudhuri, B. A photographic Method of Estimating the Mass of the Mesotron. Nature 148, 259–260 (1941)
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!