45 Facts About Bruno Rossi

Bruno Benedetto Rossi was an Italian experimental physicist.

Bruno Rossi made major contributions to particle physics and the study of cosmic rays.

Bruno Rossi then moved to Britain, where he worked with Patrick Blackett at the University of Manchester.

Bruno Rossi stayed in the United States, and became an American Citizen.

Bruno Rossi was born to a Jewish family in Venice, Italy.

Bruno Rossi was the eldest of three sons of Rino Rossi and Lina Minerbi.

Bruno Rossi's father was an electrical engineer, who participated in the electrification of Venice.

Bruno Rossi was tutored at home until the age of fourteen, after which he attended the Ginnasio and the Liceo in Venice.

Bruno Rossi's thesis advisor was Quirino Majorana, who was a well-known experimentalist and an uncle of the physicist Ettore Majorana.

In 1928, Bruno Rossi began his career at the University of Florence, as assistant to Antonio Garbasso, who had founded the University's Physics Institute in 1920.

When Bruno Rossi arrived, Garbasso was Podesta of Florence, appointed by Benito Mussolini's fascist government of Italy.

In search of pioneering research, Bruno Rossi turned his attention to cosmic rays, which had been discovered by Victor Hess in manned balloon flights in 1911 and 1912.

In 1929, Bruno Rossi read the paper of Walther Bothe and Werner Kolhorster, which described their discovery of charged cosmic ray particles that penetrated 4.1 centimetres of gold.

Fermi invited Bruno Rossi to give an introductory talk on cosmic rays.

Bruno Rossi coined the name "cosmic rays" and proposed that they were photons created by the fusion of hydrogen in interstellar space.

Bruno Rossi was not pleased by the presentation of evidence that most observed cosmic rays are energetic charged particles.

Immediately after the Rome conference, Bruno Rossi carried out two experiments that led to a significant advance in the understanding of cosmic rays.

Late in 1931, Bruno Rossi arranged for Occhialini to work in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge with Patrick Blackett, whom he had met in Berlin.

In 1932, Bruno Rossi won a competition for an academic position in an Italian university, and was appointed professor of experimental physics at the University of Padua.

Later, with Frederick C Chromey, Alvarez and Rossi patented a "Vertical Determination Device", which made use of cosmic ray telescopes.

In Eritrea, Bruno Rossi discovered another phenomenon that would become a principal theme of his postwar cosmic ray research: extensive cosmic ray air showers.

In 1937, Bruno Rossi became acquainted with Nora Lombroso, the daughter of Ugo Lombroso, a professor of physiology at the University of Palermo, and Silvia Forti.

Bruno Rossi's grandfather was the renowned physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and her aunts, Gina Lombroso and Paola Lombroso Carrara, were well known Italian writers and educators.

Bruno Rossi summarised this period in a memoir: "The Decay of 'Mesotrons' : Experimental Particle Physics in the Age of Innocence", which he presented in a symposium at Fermilab in 1980.

Bruno Rossi hoped that one of them would find Rossi a job, and soon, Rossi received an invitation to come to the University of Manchester, where Blackett was developing a major center of cosmic ray research.

At Manchester, Bruno Rossi collaborated with Ludwig Janossy on an experiment which demonstrated the correctness of the Bethe-Heitler theory of the second process, which had not yet been fully confirmed.

Bruno Rossi urged Rossi to begin a series of experiments that summer, before snow blocked the road, and to help, enlisted two of his friends, Norman Hillberry and J Barton Hoag, and a student, Winston Bostick.

The next summer, Bruno Rossi returned to Mount Evans where he performed experiments near Echo Lake at an elevation 3,230 metres.

At Cornell, Bruno Rossi met his first American graduate student, Kenneth Greisen, with whom he wrote an article, "Cosmic-Ray Theory", which was published in the Reviews of Modern Physics and became known among cosmic-ray researchers as "The Bible".

Greisen and Bruno Rossi carried out experiments, which showed, in terms of processes documented in the "Bible", that not all particles of the soft component, could be produced by mesotrons of the hard component.

In early July 1943, Bethe invited Bruno Rossi to join the Manhattan Project.

Bruno Rossi soon realized that there already existed a group with a similar mission headed by the Swiss physicist Hans H Staub.

Bruno Rossi was enlisted to implement a method to test various weapon designs to arrive at one that produced an accurately symmetrical spherical implosion.

Bruno Rossi left Los Alamos for Cambridge on 6 February 1946.

Bruno Rossi's group focused on the use of cloud chambers to study their properties and interactions.

In early 1953, with Bridge, Richard Safford and Charles Peyrou, Bruno Rossi published results of a comprehensive cloud chamber study of the elementary particles that became known as kaons.

Leprince-Ringuet asked Bruno Rossi to give a summary of new information presented at the conference and to propose nomenclature for the new particles.

Bruno Rossi came to MIT in 1954 from the University of Minnesota, where he completed a PhD under Edward P Ney.

Soon, he was joined by Livio Scarsi, whom Bruno Rossi had recruited from Occhialini's group at the University of Milan.

Bruno Rossi formed a subcommittee which included Thomas Gold, Philip Morrison and biologist Salvador Luria, who agreed that investigations of plasma in interplanetary space would be desirable.

Consequently, Bruno Rossi decided to turn his group's efforts towards its study.

Nevertheless, during 52 hours of data recorded by the MIT probe before battery power ran out, Bruno Rossi's group found a transition between two distinct regions around earth.

Bruno Rossi died from a cardiac arrest at his home in Cambridge on 21 November 1993.

Bruno Rossi was survived by his wife, Nora, daughters Florence and Linda and son Frank.

Bruno Rossi was cremated, and his ashes are in the graveyard of the church of San Miniato al Monte, which overlooks Florence and the hill of Arcetri.