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Biography of Victor Francis Hess
Name: Victor Francis Hess
Birth Date: June 24, 1883
Death Date: December 18, 1964
Place of Birth: Schloss Waldstein, Austria
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: physicist
Victor Francis Hess
The American physicist Victor Francis Hess (1883-1964) shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of cosmic rays.Victor Francis (originally Franz) Hess was born on June 24, 1883, at Schloss Waldstein, Styria. He studied physics at the universities of Graz (1901-1905) and Vienna (1905-1908) and graduated as a doctor of philosophy at Graz in 1906. From 1910 to 1920 Hess was a lecturer at the Institute for Radium Research in the University of Vienna.In 1900 C. T. R. Wilson proved that air is a slight conductor of electricity. Thereafter it was held that this property of the air was due to ionization by gamma rays emitted by radioactive substances in the air or in the earth. It was known that gamma rays are almost completely absorbed by 300 meters of air. To test the theory, balloon ascents were made between 1909 and 1911. Each showed that the ionization was too great to have been due to gamma rays emitted …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…professor of physics at Innsbruck. In 1931 he established an observatory for the study of the diurnal and nocturnal fluctuations of the cosmic rays, at which he had hinted in 1912. In 1938 Hess accepted the chair of physics at Fordham University, New York, and he became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. He died in New York on Dec. 18, 1964.Hess's discovery encouraged the study of subatomic particles and led to the discovery of the positron by C. D. Anderson. In 1936 Hess shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Anderson, and he received many other honors. Further Reading There is a biography of Hess in Nobel Lectures, Physics, 1922-1941 (1965), which also includes his Nobel Lecture. For a discussion of his work see N. H. deV. Heathcote, Nobel Prize Winners, Physics, 1901-1950 (1953). For the effects of cosmic rays see F. K. Richtmyer and E. H. Kennard, Introduction to Modern Physics (1950), and S. Glasstone, Sourcebook of Atomic Energy (1958).
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