Kenneth Greisen

Kenneth Ingvard Greisen ( born January 24, 1918 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, † March 17, 2007 in Ithaca, New York) is an American physicist who dealt with nuclear physics and high energy astrophysics.

Life

Greisen in 1942 received his doctorate from Cornell University with Bruno Rossi in Physics ( Intensity of cosmic rays at low altitude and the origin of the soft component). He was involved in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos from 1943 to 1946, where he was group leader. In 1945, he was an eyewitness to the Trinity test ( as a member of the detonation teams). Then he went to Cornell University in 1946, first as an assistant professor and later as a professor for physics. From 1975 he was professor of astronomy and 1976-1979 Board of the Faculty of Astronomy and 1978-1983 Dean of the Faculty. In 1986, he retired. 1975-1981 he was adjunct professor at the University of Utah.

He dealt with experiments on cosmic rays and gamma-ray astronomy, where she first worked with balloons. In 1971 he discovered as with colleagues with the Pulsar synchronized gamma radiation in the Crab Nebula. He suggested the 1966 GZK cutoff before regardless of Georgi Sazepin and Vadim Kuzmin in the Soviet Union at the same time.

In 1971 he was one of the founders of the Department of High Energy Astrophysics of the American Astronomical Society and was its first chairman. At Cornell University in 1969, he headed a group that modernized the introductory physics courses.

Since 1974 he was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.