Victor Francis Hess
Austrian physicist and Nobel prize laureate (1883-1964) · United States · Scientists · Died at 81
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Something wrong?He went up in a balloon with an electroscope and proved that radiation was raining down from space, not rising from the ground - a finding that flipped early 20th-century physics and won him the Nobel.
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About this person
Victor Franz Hess was born in Austria on 24 June 1883. An experimental physicist, he made the ascent that would define his career: balloon flights carrying instruments that measured ionizing radiation at altitude. The readings climbed as he rose, showing the source was cosmic, not terrestrial. That work earned him a share of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Carl David Anderson. He later became an Austrian-American scientist and died on 17 December 1964.
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Scientists from the United States 2
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