Edward P. Ney

Edward Purdy Ney (October 28, 1920 – July 9, 1996) was an American physicist who made major contributions to cosmic ray research, atmospheric physics, heliophysics, and infrared astronomy.

He was a discoverer of cosmic ray heavy nuclei and of solar proton events.

He pioneered the use of high-altitude balloons for scientific investigations and helped to develop procedures and equipment that underlie modern scientific ballooning.

He was one of the first researchers to put experiments aboard spacecraft.

However, in October 1920, his mother went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Ney was delivered by Caesarean section.

After elementary school, he attended Waukon High School, where he developed an interest in science and mathematics that was encouraged by Coach Howard B. Moffitt, who taught several of his courses and later became an administrator at the University of Iowa.

In 1938, Ney began undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota, where he became acquainted with Professor Alfred O. C. Nier, who was an expert in mass spectrometry.

Soon, Nier recruited him to work in the spectroscopy laboratory for 35 cents per hour.

In February 1940, Nier prepared a tiny but pure sample of Uranium-235, which he mailed to Columbia University, where John R. Dunning and his team proved that this isotope was responsible for nuclear fission, rather than the more abundant Uranium-238.

This finding was a crucial step in the development of the atomic bomb.

That summer, Ney and Robert Thompson prepared a larger sample of Uranium-235, which provided material for further important tests.

Later, he helped Nier design and test mass spectrographs that were replicated for extensive use in the Manhattan Project.

In June 1942, after graduating with a B.S. degree in physics, Ney married June Felsing.

They had four children: Judy, John, Arthur, and William.

That year, Ney took his bride and two of Nier's mass spectrographs to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he began graduate studies with Jesse Beams at the University of Virginia.

Ney brought experience and equipment that contributed significantly to Beams's wartime project to develop gas centrifuges for separation of uranium isotopes.

With Beams as his thesis advisor, Ney measured the self-diffusion coefficient of uranium hexafluoride.

In 1946, Ney received his Ph.D. in physics and became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

With Beams and Leland Swoddy, he began an underground cosmic ray experiment in Endless Caverns near New Market, Virginia.

John T. Tate was an influential professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, who was Nier's mentor and editor of the Physical Review.

After the war, he recognized the research potential of large plastic balloons, which had been invented by Jean Piccard and were being manufactured at the General Mills Laboratories in the Como neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Here, Otto C. Winzen used polyethylene to make balloons whose performance at high altitudes was better than the cellophane ones developed by Piccard.

At the time, his results were classified, but in 1947, they were published in the Physical Review.

In 1947, because of Ney's interest in cosmic rays, Tate offered him a position as assistant professor, which was immediately accepted.

Except for a sabbatical and two brief leaves of absence, Ney spent the rest of his life at Minnesota.

Back in Minneapolis, Ney met Frank Oppenheimer and Edward J. Lofgren, who had both arrived about a year earlier.

In response to Tate's initiative, these three decided to use balloons to study primary cosmic rays at the top of the atmosphere.

At first, they focused on developing cloud chambers small enough to fly on balloons, but soon realized that nuclear emulsions offer a more portable way to detect energetic particles.

To take charge of emulsion work, they enlisted a graduate student, Phyllis S. Freier, as the fourth member of their group.

Later, she became a renowned professor.

In 1948, the Minnesota group collaborated with Bernard Peters and Helmut L. Bradt, of the University of Rochester, to launch a balloon flight carrying a cloud chamber and emulsions.

This flight gave evidence for heavy nuclei among the cosmic rays.

More specifically, the researchers discovered that, in addition to Hydrogen nuclei (protons), primary cosmic rays contain substantial numbers of fast moving nuclei of elements from helium to iron.

In ordinary matter, atoms of these elements consist of a nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons, but when the nuclei arrive as cosmic rays, they are devoid of electrons, because of collisions with atoms in interstellar matter.

In both emulsions and cloud chambers, these "stripped" heavy nuclei leave an unmistakable track, which is much denser and "hairier" than that of protons, and whose characteristics make it possible to determine their atomic number.

In further flights, the group showed that the abundances of elements in cosmic rays are similar to those found on Earth and in stars.

These results had a major impact, for they showed that studies of cosmic radiation could play a significant role in astrophysics.

In 1963, Ney became one of the first infrared astronomers.

He founded O'Brien Observatory, where he and his colleagues discovered that certain stars are surrounded by grains of carbon and silicate minerals and established that these grains, from which planets are formed, are ubiquitous in circumstellar winds and regions of star formation.

Ney's father, Otto Fred Ney and mother, Jessamine Purdy Ney, lived in Waukon, Iowa.