23 Facts About John Linsley

John David Linsley was an American physicist who performed pioneering research on cosmic rays, particularly ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

John Linsley did his most significant work from 1959 to 1978 using a ground-based array of detectors at Volcano Ranch in New Mexico.

John Linsley is best known for being the first to detect an air shower created by a primary particle with an energy of 10 eV.

John David Linsley was born on March 12,1925, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

John Linsley's father, James Adolphus Linsley, was born in Morris, Minnesota, and worked for the Minneapolis Transit Company as a streetcar conductor.

John Linsley's mother, Martha Carolina Linsley, was born in Follinge, Sweden, and was a graduate of the University of Minnesota.

John Linsley was homeschooled by his mother for much of his childhood and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis in 1941.

John Linsley attended the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1946.

In 1954, John Linsley took a job as a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John Linsley held this position from 1954 to 1955 and from 1958 to 1972.

John Linsley worked with Livio Scarsi from the University of Milan to build an array of nineteen plastic scintillation detectors at Volcano Ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico.

On February 22,1962, John Linsley observed an air shower created by a primary particle with an energy greater than 10 eV, the highest energy cosmic ray particle ever detected at the time.

John Linsley's observations indicated that not all cosmic rays are confined within the galaxy and provided the first evidence of a flattening of the cosmic ray spectrum at energies above 10 eV.

Volcano Ranch was transferred from MIT to the University of New Mexico in 1972 and John Linsley took a position as adjunct professor of physics at the University of New Mexico.

In 1973, John Linsley created a denser array at Volcano Ranch to study the lateral distribution of air showers.

John Linsley's work led him to develop the elongation rate theorem, which describes the rate of the change of the atmospheric depth of the air shower maximum with the energy of the primary particle.

In 1976, John Linsley became a Research Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico.

John Linsley served as principal investigator on two research projects and collaborated on several others.

John Linsley was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics by Pierre Auger in 1980 for his work with cosmic rays.

John Linsley won the Premio Internazionale San Valentino d'Oro in astrophysics in 1982.

John Linsley was actively involved in this project, which evolved into AirWatch-OWL, and in the Extreme Universe Space Observatory, another project to create a space-based observatory for the investigation of cosmic rays.

John Linsley died on September 15,2002, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

John Linsley is survived by his son, Alessandro and his daughters, Mrs Joanna Linsley-Poe and Amina.