J. Curry Street

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Jabez Curry Street (born May 5, 1906 in Opelika (Alabama) , † November 7, 1989 in Charleston (South Carolina) ) was an American experimental physicist and electrical engineer. He was one of the discoverers of the muon .

biography

Street studied electrical engineering at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute with a bachelor's degree in 1927 and then worked as an engineer for the Brooklyn Edison Power Company. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 1931 and was a fellow of the Bartol Research Foundation for a year. During this time he began investigating cosmic rays. In 1932 he became an instructor and later a professor at Harvard University . In 1970 he became Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and in 1976 he retired. From 1955 to 1960 he was at Harvard's physics faculty.

In 1937 he and EC Stevenson (also from Harvard) discovered the particle later called muon in cosmic rays, as did Carl D. Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer from Caltech in the same year . At that time it was given various names (including meson), only later muon prevailed.

During the Second World War, from 1940 to 1945 he played a key role in the development of radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (ground and ship radar) and the development of the LORAN system (he was in charge of production of the prototype). At Harvard, he was Acting Director of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator at Harvard and MIT in 1962/63. He developed a range of measuring devices such as coincidence detectors for muons.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1937) and the National Academy of Sciences (1953). In 1986 he gave lectures at Harvard on his discoveries as part of the historical section of the Loeb Lectures .

literature

  • Mario Bertolotti: Cosmic rays. The story of a scientific adventure, Springer 2013

Fonts

  • JC Street, EC Stevenson: New Evidence for the Existence of a Particle of Mass Intermediate Between the Proton and Electron, Phys. Rev., Volume 52, 1937, 1003

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The work by Anderson, Neddermeyer appeared in the same Physical Review issue on p. 885
personal data
SURNAME Street, J. Curry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Street, Jabez Curry; Street, curry; Street, JC
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Opelika (Alabama)
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1989
Place of death Charleston, South Carolina