[4] He attended the University of Rochester's 6th Annual Conference on High Energy Nuclear Physics, where he contributed a paper[5] and roomed with Richard Feynman.

[6][2][7][8] At Duke University, Block led the team that developed the world's first liquid-helium bubble chamber, which was used for study of several newly discovered particles.

[9][10] He codiscovered the eta meson, and he probed particles at ever-higher energies by using heavy-liquid bubble chambers and, eventually, modern counter detectors.

His work took him to accelerators all over the world, with extended stints at Fermilab, CERN, and Lawrence Berkeley, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Laboratories.

A central focus of his later work was on the forward-scattering amplitudes of hadron collisions, particularly at the highest energies available at the most powerful modern accelerators as well as from cosmic rays.