Astro Fisika: How Indonesian People Get Nobel Prize in The Future

Friday 4 September 2009

How Indonesian People Get Nobel Prize in The Future

Central for Research and Development for Winning

Nobel Prize in Physics at Indonesia

Nobel Fisika Indonesia

Presentation Speech

Victor Franz Hess

Carl David Anderson

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1936 was divided equally between Victor Franz Hess "for his discovery of cosmic radiation" and Carl David Anderson "for his discovery of the positron".

Victor Francis Hess

Born	Victor Francis Hess 24 June 1883(1883-06-24) Schloss Waldstein, Peggau, Austria
Died	17 December 1964(1964-12-17) (aged 81) Mount Vernon, New York, USA
Nationality	Austro-Hungarian, Austria, United States
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Graz Austrian Academy of Sciences University of Innsbruck Fordham University
Alma mater	University of Graz
Known for	discovery of cosmic rays
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics 1936

Victor Francis Hess (24 June 1883 – 17 December 1964) was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays.

Biography

Early years

Hess was born to Vinzens Hess and Serafine Edle von Grossbauer-Waldstätt, in Waldstein Castle, near Peggau in Styria, Austria. His father was a royal forester in Prince Louis of Oettingen-Wallerstein's service. He attended secondary school at Graz Gymnasium from 1893 to 1901.^[1]^[2]

Career

From 1901 to 1905 Hess was an undergraduate student at the University of Graz, and continued postgraduate studies in physics until he received his PhD there in 1910. He worked as Assistant under Stefan Meyer at the Institute for Radium Research, Viennese Academy of Sciences, from 1910 to 1920. Hess took a leave of absence in 1921 and travelled to the United States, working at the US Radium Corporation, in New Jersey, and as Consulting Physicist for the US Bureau of Mines, in Washington DC. In 1923, he returned to the University of Graz, and was appointed the Ordinary Professor of Experimental Physics in 1925. The University of Innsbruck appointed him Professor, and Director Institute of Radiology, in 1931.^[1]

Hess relocated to the United States with his Jewish wife in 1938, in order to escape Nazi persecution. The same year Fordham University appointed him Professor of Physics, and he later became a naturalized United States citizen in 1944. Retiring from Fordham in 1956, Hess died on 17 December 1964, in Mount Vernon, New York, United States.^[3]

Pioneering discovery

Between 1911 and 1913, Hess undertook the work that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936. For many years, scientists had been puzzled by the levels of ionizing radiation measured in the atmosphere. The assumption at the time was that the radiation would decrease as the distance from the earth, the source of the radiation, increased. The electroscopes previously used gave an approximate measurement of the radiation, but indicated that higher in the atmosphere the level of radiation may actually be more than that on the ground. Hess approached this mystery first by greatly increasing the precision of the measuring equipment, and then by personally taking the equipment aloft in a balloon. He systematically measured the radiation at altitudes up to 5.3 km during 1911-12. The daring flights were made both at day and during the night, at significant risk to himself.^[2]

The result of Hess's meticulous work was published in the Proceedings of the Viennese Academy of Sciences, and showed the level of radiation decreased up to an altitude of about 1 km, but above that the level increased considerably, with the radiation detected at 5 km about twice that at sea level.^[4] His conclusion was that there was radiation penetrating the atmosphere from outer space, and his discovery was confirmed by Robert Andrews Millikan in 1925, who gave the radiation the name "cosmic rays". Hess's discovery opened the door to many new discoveries in nuclear physics.^[2]

Carl David Anderson
Carl Anderson at LBNL, 1937
Born	September 3, 1905(1905-09-03) New York City, New York, USA
Died	January 11, 1991(1991-01-11) (aged 85) San Marino, California, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physics
Institutions	California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	California Institute of Technology
Notable students	Donald A. Glaser Seth Neddermeyer
Known for	Discovery of the positron Discovery of the muon
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics 1936 Elliott Cresson Medal (1937)

Carl David Anderson (3 September 1905 – 11 January 1991) was an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.

Biography

Anderson was born in New York City, the son of Swedish immigrants. He studied physics and engineering at Caltech (B.S., 1927; Ph.D., 1930). Under the supervision of Robert A. Millikan, he began investigations into cosmic rays during the course of which he encountered unexpected particle tracks in his cloud chamber photographs that he correctly interpreted as having been created by a particle with the same mass as the electron, but with opposite electrical charge. This discovery, announced in 1932 and later confirmed by others, validated Paul Dirac's theoretical prediction of the existence of the positron. Anderson obtained the first direct proof that positrons existed by shooting gamma rays produced by the natural radioactive nuclide ThC'' (²⁰⁸Tl)^[1] into other materials, resulting in creation of positron-electron pairs. For this work, Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1936 with Victor Hess.^[2]

Also in 1936, Anderson and his first graduate student, Seth Neddermeyer, discovered the muon (or 'mu-meson', as it was known for many years), a subatomic particle 207 times more massive than the electron. Anderson and Neddermeyer at first believed that they had seen the pion, a particle which Hideki Yukawa had postulated in his theory of the strong interaction. When it became clear that what Anderson had seen was not the pion, the physicist I. I. Rabi, puzzled as to how the unexpected discovery could fit into any logical scheme of particle physics, quizzically asked "Who ordered that?" (sometimes the story goes that he was dining with colleagues at a Chinese restaurant at the time). The muon was the first of a long list of subatomic particles whose discovery initially baffled theoreticians who could not make the confusing "zoo" fit into some tidy conceptual scheme. Willis Lamb, in his 1955 Nobel Prize Lecture, joked that he had heard it said that "the finder of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a discovery now ought to be punished by a 10,000 dollar fine." ^[3]

Anderson spent all of his academic and research career at Caltech. During World War II, he conducted research in rocketry there. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.^[4] He died on January 11, 1991, and his remains were interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.