Science: Three Prizes

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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 sum.

Dr. Debye has done powerful work on the conduction of electricity by salt solutions, the electrical properties of insulators, the heat capacities of solids, the atomic architecture of molecules. He was one of four men who turned the crystal diffraction grating invented by Max von Laue into a precise instrument which, by combing X-rays through the atomic lattice in the crystal, determines the composition of a mixture as exactly as by chemical analysis. In Pittsburgh last September Chemist Debye pointed out to the American Chemical Society that water has a quasi-crystalline structure, therefore resembles a diamond more closely in arrangement than it resembles its own gaseous form, steam. "We are just beginning to know what water is," he said wryly, "although we have been calling it H2O for more than a century."

Dr. 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 material in the ground. If this were so, the radiation should have fallen off markedly at short distances above ground. By carrying instruments up in balloons, Hess, Gockel and Kolhörster killed off the terrestrial radioactivity theory. In 1911 Hess made seven flights to 3,000 ft., found no decrease in the rays whatever. Later, nearly six miles up, he found them seven times stronger than on the ground. "A radiation of very high penetrating power," he wrote, "enters our atmosphere from above."

In 1934, 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.

Dr. Anderson discovered the positive electron under curious circumstances. He was not looking for it, and its existence had already been foreshadowed by a British theorist only three years older than he was.