Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week the Swedish Royal Academy of Science awarded its 1936 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to a profound student of molecular structure, Professor Peter Joseph Wilhelm Debye, 52, of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. The Prize for Physics was divided between a pioneer cosmic ray researcher, Professor Victor Franz Hess, 53, of Austria's Innsbruck University, and 31-year-old Professor Carl David Anderson of California Institute of Technology, discoverer of a fundamental particle of matter, the positive electron. Prizeman Debye will receive about $40,000, Prizemen Anderson & Hess each half that...
...Hess was the first man to see clearly that the cosmic rays were cosmic-that is, that they did not come from the earth or the atmosphere. Enthusiastic Austrians once called this mysterious radiation "Hess Rays," just as an enthusiastic U. S. scientist later called them "Millikan Rays." Cosmic rays, as almost everyone now knows, bombard Earth continuously from every direction in the sky. No one knew this when the 20th Century opened. About that time it was observed that some sort of radiation from somewhere was constantly ionizing the air in electroscopes. Some theorists thought the source was radioactive...
...still on the job, Dr. Hess aimed his recorders at the exploding star Nova Hercules (TIME, Dec. 31, 1934) to see whether, as some cosmologists had suggested, such stellar blow-ups could be a source of cosmic rays. He did detect a slight increase in cosmic ray intensity from the direction of the nova, but too small to be of definite significance...
...second by gamma rays, and the Curie-Joliots of Paris observed them shooting out of light-weight elements in their first experiments with artificial radioactivity. It has even been suggested, despite their brief lives in the laboratory, that positrons may be a component of the primary cosmic rays...
With this data from the highest altitude to which he had ever sent instruments, Dr. Millikan reported last week that cosmic ray intensity increases to a maximum at 66,000 ft., then falls off 22% on the way up to 92,000 ft. This contradicts the generally accepted finding of Erich Regener of Stuttgart who sent unmanned balloons up more than 100,000 ft., found increasing cosmic Bombardment up to 85,000 ft., a fairly steady intensity above that altitude...