HOUGHTON--Dr.
James W. Cronin, professor of physics at the University of Chicago's
Enrico Fermi Institute and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for
Physics, will speak at Michigan Tech Sept. 16 as part of the
University's Melvin Calvin Nobel Laureate Series.
Dr. Cronin will participate in a tree planting ceremony in his honor at 2:00 p.m. on the campus mall adjacent to the Minerals and Materials Building. His public lecture, "Eighty-five Years of Cosmic Ray Research: A Human and Scientific Drama," will take place at 4:00 p.m. in room U115 of the Minerals and Materials Building.
Cronin received a Ph.D in physics from the University of Chicago in 1955. He served as assistant physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1955 until 1958, when he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of physics at Princeton University. In 1971 he returned to the University of Chicago as professor of physics. In 1980 he and colleague Val L. Fitch received the Nobel Prize for their discovery of charge conjugation/parity violation, the asymmetry in the behavior of matter and antimatter. Cronin is a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He is a project co-leader, along with Dr. Alan A. Watson of the University of Leeds (United Kingdom) of the 19-nation Pierre Auger Project to study very-high-energy cosmic rays.
The Auger Project consortium began construction earlier this year on a cosmic ray observatory in Argentina that will consist of 1,600 particle detector stations arranged in a giant grid covering 3,000 square kilometers, an area about 10 times the size of the city of Paris. The detector array will record the arrival on earth of air "showers" caused by the most powerful particle interactions ever observed, in an attempt to track down the unknown origin of these extremely high-energy cosmic rays. Dr. David Nitz of Michigan Tech is a member of the Pierre Auger team.
Cosmic rays are fast-moving atomic nuclei that bombard the earth from outer space. They travel at nearly the speed of light, indicating they have very high energy. some of them, in fact, are the most energetic of any particles ever observed in nature. Although scientists can account for the origin of most cosmic rays, no one knows the source of the highest-energy cosmic ray particles, which have energies more than a million times greater than the particles produced in the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
"Breaking ground for the first Pierre Auger Observatory marks a culmination of the hopes and dreams and the untiring dedication of hundreds of scientists working together," said Cronin. "We have been working with agencies and governments around the world for four years to reach this moment. It is truly a great achievement for international scientific collaboration--for science without borders."
Cronin is the author of 62 professional papers on physics and 15 invited conference reports. In 1994 he was honored with the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
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9/8/99