Erich Regener

Who was Erich Regener?

Erich Rudolf Alexander Regener was a German physicist known primarily for the design and construction of instruments to measure cosmic ray intensity at various altitudes.

Regener was born in Schleusenau near Bromberg, West Prussia. He studied physics from 1900 to 1905 at the University of Berlin under Emil Warburg and from 1909 worked with Heinrich Rubens. In 1911 he became professor of experimental physics and meteorology at the Agricultural University of Berlin. In 1920 he became the professor in experimental physics at the University of Stuttgart working alongside the theoretical physicist Paul Peter Ewald. During this time, he developed instruments to measure cosmic rays at various altitudes. Bruno Rossi wrote of this period that "In the late 1920s and early 1930s the technique of self-recording electroscopes carried by balloons into the highest layers of the atmosphere or sunk to great depths under water was brought to an unprecedented degree of perfection by the German physicist Erich Regener and his group. To these scientists we owe some of the most accurate measurements ever made of cosmic-ray ionization as a function of altitude and depth." Ernest Rutherford stated in 1931 that "thanks to the fine experiments of Professor Millikan and the even more far-reaching experiments of Professor Regener, we have now got for the first time, a curve of absorption of these radiations in water which we may safely rely upon.".