Marietta Blau
Marietta Blau ( born April 29, 1894 in Vienna, † 27 January 1970 in Vienna) was an Austrian physicist.
Life
Marietta Blau was the daughter of the lawyer and music publisher Mayer (Mark ) Blue and his wife Florentine, née Gold branch. After graduating from high school at the girls' school of the Association for Advanced Women's Education ( Rahlgasse ) in 1914 studied Marietta Blau 1914 to 1918 at the University of Vienna physics and mathematics. Your doctorate in 1919 on the theme " On the Absorption of divergent γ - radiation". Her scientific mentors in Vienna were Franz Serafin Exner, Philipp Furtwängler and Stefan Meyer.
Since you seemed impossible at first an academic career in Austria in the postwar period, she worked from 1920-21 in the X-ray tube factory Fuerstenau in Berlin. Then they went to the Institute for Physical Basis of Medicine, University of Frankfurt, where she was mainly concerned with the teaching of future physicians in X-ray physics. In 1923 she returned to Vienna, where her mother was seriously ill. From 1923 she worked as a free, ie unpaid researcher at the Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. It was supported financially by her family and held by small research assistant activities financially afloat. Research in Göttingen Robert Wichard Pohl and the Radium Institute in Paris (1932/1933) were made possible by a grant her the association of academics in Austria.
In their Vienna years, Blue was mainly interested in the photographic method for the detection of single particles. The methodological goals they pursued this case, were the identification of the particles, in particular protons and alpha particles, and the determination of their energy from the train tracks that they cause in emulsions. But were blue and her collaborator Hertha Wambacher 1937 Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The highlight of their joint efforts, the two also in 1937 discovered in photographic plates that had been exposed at an altitude of 2300 m of cosmic rays, " shattering star ", which are star- shaped running Teilchenbahnspuren of nuclear reactions ( Spallationsereignissen ) of the cosmic ray particles with nuclei of photographic emulsion.
1938 saw blue just before the "Anschluss" forced because of their Jewish ancestry to emigrate from Austria, which meant a severe downturn in their scientific career. She turned first to Oslo, where she worked in the laboratory of Ellen Gleditsch at the Chemical Institute, then went after the outbreak of the Second World War, but through the agency of Albert Einstein at the Institute of Technology in Mexico City. Since the conditions in Mexico, the research very difficult, she took the opportunity in 1944 to move to the United States. About 10 years she had to mention only few opportunities to prolonged serious scientific work, while her left behind in Vienna half-finished work with their local colleagues who turned out to be partly as a hidden Nazis, continued and were partially published without her name here.
In the U.S., Blue worked until 1948 in the industry and then worked until 1960 at academic institutions (Columbia University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Miami ). She was responsible for the use of the photographic method for particle detection in high- energy experiments at particle accelerators. It was proposed, together with Wambacher by Erwin Schrödinger for the Nobel Prize for Physics. However, this was Cecil Powell, whose work had been much inspired by the blue and Wambacher. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Powell said the two scientists with no word.
1960 Blue returned back to Austria, where she pursued again until 1964 at the Radium Institute unpaid their research. She led a working group, the photographic images of Teilchenbahnspuren of experiments analyzed at CERN, and even supervised a dissertation in this field. 1962 awarded the Austrian Academy of Sciences Blue Erwin Schrödinger Prize, inclusion in the Academy failed to materialize.
1970 Blue died penniless in Vienna from cancer. Your disease is associated with many years of unprotected work with radioactive substances, as well as with cigarette smoking related. In any scientific journal published an obituary. In 2005, the University of Vienna named a room in its main building and the city of Vienna an alley in the 22nd district to Marietta Blue.