Victor Francis Hess
Victor Franz Hess ( * June 24, 1883 in Castle Waldstein near German Feistritzwerke, Styria, † December 17, 1964 in Mount Vernon, New York) was an Austrian-American physicist. For the discovery of cosmic rays in 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for physics.
Life
Hess was the son of a forester in the service of the Prince of Oettingen - Wallenstein. His mother was Serafine Noble Gross Bauer Waldstatt. The training received Hess entirely in Graz - 1893-1901 in high school, then at the Karl- Franzens- University, where he received his doctorate in 1906 "Sub auspiciis Imperatoris ".
From 1910 to 1920 he worked for a short time on the 2nd Physics Institute at the University of Vienna, where he Egon Schweidler familiar in the field of radioactivity made with the latest knowledge, at the newly founded Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences as an assistant under Stefan Meyer. In World War Hess led the X-ray department of a hospital reserve.
On one of his balloon ascents, which led him in Brandenburg of Usti nad Labem in Bohemia to Pieskow, Hess discovered on August 7, 1912 Cosmic rays, which he still called cosmic rays. He was referring to the data is not published ( as a measurement error was assumed ) the physicist Karl Berg joke that had this registered in 1908. He published the discovery in the journal Physics.
1919 Hess was appointed as associate professor at the University of Graz, just a short time later to work for two years in the U.S., where he worked among others on the medical applications of radium. Back in Graz, he worked on but lack of funds primarily with the atmospheric electricity. Starting in 1931 as a professor at the University of Innsbruck, he was head of the newly created Department of Radiology, had to be there but also because yet suffered in Vienna Radium burns a thumb amputation and undergoing surgery in the larynx. On his initiative, the station goes back to Innsbruck for the observation of cosmic rays on Hafelekar.
In 1936, Hess together with Carl David Anderson received the Nobel Prize in physics for those works that had led to the discovery of cosmic rays in Vienna in 1912. In 1937 he was appointed again to the Karl- Franzens- University of Graz.
As a cosmopolitan thinker and active Catholic Hess known for his rejection of National Socialism. After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich Hess was arrested shortly. On 28 May 1938, he was 55 -year-old first put into provisional retirement and released in September 1938, without notice and without pension claim. In addition, he was forced to exchange the product obtained in Sweden and he invested there Nobel prize against German Reich treasury bills. In the same year he emigrated with his Jewish wife to the United States, where he continued at Fordham University in New York City his work. In 1944, he received the U.S. citizenship. After the Second World War, he traveled several times to Vienna and Innsbruck.
Victor Hess is buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in White Plains ( New York).
Awards (excerpt)
- Lieben Prize in 1919
- Nobel Prize in Physics 1936
- Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, 1959
- After Victor Hess, a lunar crater is named.
- In honor of Victor Hess is the acronym of the High Energy Stereoscopic System in Namibia ( on the farm Göllschau ) HESS
- 2012 remember the Austrian Academy of Sciences and other research institutions with symposia and receptions to Victor Hess.
- Victor Hess in honor left the Institute of High Energy Physics September 1, 2012 to ascend a stratospheric balloon from the Graz Schlossberg.