Hess, Victor Francis (redirected from Victor Hess)

Hess, Victor Francis, 1883–1964, American physicist, b. Austria, Ph.D. Univ. of Graz, 1906. After teaching at the universities of Graz and Innsbruck, he came to the United States in 1938 and was later naturalized. He became professor of physics at Fordham Univ. in 1938. By means of instruments carried aloft in balloons, Hess and others proved that radiation that ionizes the atmosphere is of cosmic origin. For this discovery of cosmic rays he shared with C. D. Anderson the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics. He attributed (1939) a 27-day cycle of cosmic-ray intensity to the magnetic field of the sun and correlated it with the 27-day period of rotation of the sun. He also worked on devising methods for detecting minute quantities of radioactive substances. His works include Cosmic Radiation and Its Biological Effects (with Jakob Eugster, 1940, 2d ed. 1949).

---

Hess, Victor Francis

(born June 24, 1883, Waldstein, Styria, Austria—died Dec. 17, 1964, Mount Vernon, N.Y., U.S.) Austrian-born U.S. physicist. He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1906. His research dealt chiefly with radioactivity and atmospheric electricity. His experiments proved what had long been suspected: an extremely penetrating radiation of extraterrestrial origin permeates the atmosphere (see cosmic ray). Further investigation of this radiation, named cosmic rays in 1925, led Carl D. Anderson (1905–91) to discover the positron and opened up new fields of research in modern physics. For this work, Hess and Anderson shared a Nobel Prize in 1936.