“An economy that fails to serve a majority of its citizens is a failed economy. In that sense, ours is a failed economy,” Stiglitz said to a standing room only crowd at the Rose Hill campus.

“The median income of a full-time male worker is lower than it was 40 years ago,” he continued. “We’ve been telling people every generation gets better. It’s not true.”

His talk, “Restoring Equitable and Sustainable Economic Growth in the United States,” was part of the Department of Economic’s Nobel lecture series and was also a reunion. Fordham economics professor Dominick Salvatore, PhD, noted in his introduction it was almost 10 years to the day that the Columbia University professor last spoke at the University.

Stiglitz recounted several ways to measure how the U.S. economy is failing. The true unemployment rate, which is officially 4.9 percent, is more likely twice that—a fact that has contributed to virtually zero wage growth over the last year.

Medium household income, meanwhile, is less than 1 percent higher than it was in 1989, he said. And even though the United States has recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, 91 percent of income growth over the last few years has gone to the top 1 percent.

Not only is income inequality a moral problem, it’s also bad economics, he said.

The reason inequality is a problem is that, although those at the top spend a much higher percentage of their income than those at the bottom, there are not enough of them.

“So if you move money from the bottom of the pyramid to the top like we’ve been doing, aggregate demand goes down,” he said. “And the recession has made things even worse.”

He also made the case that markets are not a good mechanism for managing structural transformations like the one the country is in the middle of now, as it moves from a manufacturing economy to less capital-intensive industries. The last transformation happened in the wake of World War II, when the country abandoned its agrarian roots.

The transformation was helped along by government programs that encouraged more spending, such as the G.I. Bill, he said. Even though the country was much poorer than it is now, it was much more generous.

“Seventy years ago, we said we could afford four years, eight years at the most expensive schools in our country, for anybody. When President Obama proposed two years of college education for our poorest, many people said ‘We can’t afford it.’

“I think the answer is, we can’t afford not to do it now,” he said.

He laid out several proposals toward a better economy, including imposing a carbon tax to fight climate change, more investment in infrastructure, increasing some tax rates, and an end to de facto austerity.

He reiterated that income inequality and stagnant wage growth is due to politics, not sound economics. With trickle down economics policies in place since the 1980s, “we were told we were all going to be better off, and then when that didn’t happen, what were told was we just have to do more,” he said.

“We’ve now had a third of a century,” he said. “I think we can conclude that that experiment failed.”

Bill Breisky recalls his grandfather Victor Hess, who discovered cosmic radiation 100 years ago and spent more than a quarter-century teaching physics and conducting research at Fordham.

Victor Francis Hess and I inhabited different worlds. He was born in the green heart of Austria and schooled in physics and mathematics in its Renaissance capital, Graz. I was born in the smoky city of Pittsburgh and schooled in the very unscientific world of journalism.

And yet, we shared common ground. Both of us loved searching for truth and unraveling mysteries (we shared a passion for Eric Ambler spy novels), and of course we loved Grandma Hess and her incomparable dumplings and strudels. She had married Victor two years after her first husband, Artur Breisky, a retired major in the Austro-Hungarian army, died during the First World War.

I first set eyes on my Austrian grandparents in Innsbruck in mid-1932, in the heart of the Great Depression. The Hesses had offered to share their apartment there after my father lost his job in Pittsburgh and suffered a nervous breakdown. I was almost 4 years old at the time, and my brother Arthur was an infant. His howling became an issue for grandma—or “Ma-ma,” as she was called. She demanded peace and quiet so that her husband the professor, my step-grandfather, could concentrate on his papers and have an afternoon nap.

It was a tumultuous year for both families, with young Nazis, the Heimwehr, and Bolsheviks clashing in the streets “right outside our window,” my mother reported in a letter home. But there were many good times, one of them a visit to the new cosmic radiation observatory Victor Hess had established one year earlier on Mount Hafelekar, outside of Innsbruck. My mother wrote in the Hafelekar guest book: “The top of the morning, and the top of the world!” She signed it, “Laura Breisky and Billy, Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S.A.”

Two years later, back in Pittsburgh, Laura Baer Breisky died of breast cancer.

We were still in Pittsburgh in 1936 when we received a telegram from Innsbruck informing us that Victor Hess was, belatedly, to be awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of cosmic radiation during the daring experiments he had conducted while aloft in a balloon more than two decades earlier. To celebrate, the Hesses sent my brother and me garments that were a source of amusement at the Pittsburgh school I attended—lederhosen.

By 1938, we had moved to Baltimore, and Hitler had moved into Austria. Fascist-dominated Europe was already in the midst of a great intellectual and cultural migration to America—Einstein, Pauli, Fermi, Stravinsky, Chagall—but the Anschluss hastened the process, and Austrians became the second largest national group in that migration. One writer called these emigrants “Hitler’s gift to America.”

Victor Hess, thanks to the Nazis—who dominated the faculty at the University of Graz—was made virtually penniless when he fled with my grandmother to Switzerland, having been forced to leave behind the Swedish crowns that had come with his Nobel award. The Nazis had declared grandma to be Jewish (she had converted to Catholicism but was irreligious) and grandpa to be “too cosmopolitan” (he had served as a science representative in Austria’s democratic government). But news of his plight spread rapidly, and he soon received the offer of a full professorship from Fordham University.

The Hesses spent Christmas with us in Baltimore that year, and I began a bond with my grandfather—one that lasted until his death, 26 Christmases later.

In 1943, I contracted double pneumonia, was hospitalized for eight weeks (penicillin had not yet been discovered), and recuperated with the Hesses for the summer at their apartment on William Street, in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon, New York. I had received the last rites of the Anglican church while in the hospital, and that prompted grandpa to tell me of his deep religious faith, and of the vow he had made after larynx-cancer surgery had left him with a voice that never rose above a hoarse whisper. He said he had vowed that if he were spared, he would attend Mass faithfully for the remainder of his life. He kept that vow.

“A scientist, more than other scholars,” he wrote during his first decade in America, “spends his time observing nature. It is his task to help unravel the mysteries of nature. He comes to marvel at these mysteries. Hence it is not hard for a scientist to admire the greatness of the Creator of nature. From this it is only a step to adore God.”

He took me to Mass on several Sundays after that. And to a movie, preferably one featuring Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, on afternoons when he drove grandma to one of her bridge games. Grandpa and I cheered for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, and we marveled at Pancho Segura’s two-handed swing in the Davis Cup tennis tournament. I learned that Victor Hess had been an avid tennis player as a young man.

I never saw my grandfather in tennis shorts, however. His day-to-day uniform was a three-piece Witty Brothers suit—or at least shirt, suspenders, trousers, and a vest. He required a vest with pockets ample enough to hold his gold pocket watch and chain, a packet of Chiclets chewing gum, a pen, and a small notebook, where a meticulous record of his expenses was recorded in a daily diary.

Victor Hess’ intellectual home in America was, of course, at Fordham—his laboratory, office, and lecture hall. One corner of his spacious office seemed reserved for instrumentation, to monitor the weather and measure breath samples with his good friend and colleague William McNiff, Ph.D. He and Professor McNiff developed a method of measuring small amounts of radium in the human body.

When I visited grandpa at Fordham as a boy, we would share lunch on a campus bench or at a Fordham Road restaurant that served an excellent fillet of sole for 40 cents. Those lunches often were followed by an afternoon of taking measurements—at times on a Harlem River pier where we tossed bits of raw sodium into the river and laughed at their explosive sizzle. He took me to the Empire State Building, where he and a colleague had taken measurements of radioactive fallout after Hiroshima. (He was appalled at the idea of nuclear testing after the war.) And a couple of times, I accompanied him to the 190th Street subway station beneath Fort Tryon, where he had obtained permission from the city to measure radiation in a granite wall some 400 feet below the surface.

I sat in on what I believe was his final lecture on the Rose Hill campus. He told his students that he had loved every class he had taught at Fordham.

Last year, I located one of his prize doctoral students from that time, Joseph Braddock, Ph.D., GSAS ’59. Braddock and two other physicists who studied under Hess while earning their doctorates left Fordham in 1959 to create the defense and technology contracting firm of Braddock, Dunn and McDonald, which went on to play a major role in the development of American anti-missile technology.

“My strongest memory of him is as a great lecturer—and a great listener,” Braddock said. “Often Bernie Dunn, Doctor Hess, and I sat down and had lunch, in the office or in the lab, and talked, frequently about opera. The unofficial Victor Hess was very warm.”

Grandma Hess died of cancer in 1955, at home, where she had been nursed lovingly by Elizabeth Hoencke, a German refugee. Before she passed away, grandma gave one final instruction to Victor: “Marry Elizabeth.”

Several months later, Victor did as he had been told. Elizabeth called her bridegroom “mein Schatz.” She accompanied him to Rome, when he was inducted into the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and to the White House to attend a dinner for Nobel laureates hosted by Jack and Jackie Kennedy.

Late in 1964, Victor was confined to a hospital bed in his living room. A week before Christmas, Elizabeth called our home in Connecticut to tell me, through her tears, that Parkinson’s and pneumonia had finally prevailed, and that her Victor had died.

Grandpa’s funeral, in Mount Vernon, was very small. I recall that a few Fordham Jesuits were there, along with Elizabeth’s family, but not many others. He seemed virtually forgotten, and that pained me. Grandpa Hess was buried in White Plains and gone from our lives, except in my memory.

Or so I thought.

In the fall of 2007, I underwent a procedure called proton-beam stereotactic radiosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A neurosurgeon targeted my cerebellum with high-energy protons that halted the growth of a benign tumor. Afterward, I asked the medical physicist who had worked alongside the neurosurgeon whether she had ever heard of a physicist named Victor Hess.

“Of course,” she replied, stunning with me with the news (it was news to me) that an observatory called H.E.S.S., or High Energy Stereoscopic System, had been established in Namibia to search the skies for the origin of cosmic rays. Another physicist at the hospital told me that the development of the particle accelerators that had made my radiosurgery possible was stimulated in large part by my grandfather’s balloon-flight discoveries.

In 2009, Grandpa Hess came alive for me yet again when my wife, my brother, and I visited the University of Vienna. I sat at grandpa’s old roll-top desk and examined the instrumentation he had devised for his historic 1912 balloon flights. And we met Professor Peter Schuster, who had been instrumental in establishing the Victor Franz Hess Society—in order, as he put it, “to bring him home to Austria, from which the Nazi regime had banished him, and to be once again the figurehead of Austrian physics we have been missing for too long.”

To my son John and my teenage grandson Ethan McPherson, Victor Francis Hess was a family legend and the subject of a gray photograph that hangs in my study—a stout, young mustachioed man in a three-piece suit, standing in the basket of a hot-air balloon. It seemed high time that they got to know Grandpa Hess better, so in the last week of May 2011, we paid our respects to the Rose Hill campus.

Our first stop was Freeman Hall. The Hess lab was gone, but there were countless reminders of him in the office of physics Professor Martin Sanzari, Ph.D., head of Fordham’s new engineering physics program. Sanzari had organized Victor Francis Hess Day earlier this year. We chuckled at a photo of an exuberant student wearing a T-shirt proclaiming, “Victor Hess Day is the Bess Day!” And we paused reflectively in Freeman’s lecture hall—so unchanged that I imagined I could find the seat I occupied on the last day that Victor Hess formally addressed his students.

The Arthur Avenue restaurant where we had lunch was recommended by none other than Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, who had warmly welcomed us into his office in late morning. Father McShane saw to it that John, Ethan, and I were outfitted with maroon Fordham caps before ushering us to the Administration Building’s Hall of Honor, where a Victor Hess plaque shares wall space with none other than Bronx-born baseball legend Frankie (“The Fordham Flash”) Frisch. Father McShane’s parting words to Ethan: “I’ll see you in four years.”

It was in the archives of Fordham’s William D. Walsh Family Library that the spirit of Victor Hess seemed most alive. In its stacks were copies of some of his letters to old colleagues who had made their way out of Nazi-occupied Europe to the United States—Swiss biologist Eugster on 54th Street in Manhattan, Austrian Nobel laureate Loewi on 93rd, Austrian ex-Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg in St. Louis, among others.

We found a 1950 paper written by Hess the motoring adventurer on “The Capacity of a Highway.” (A maximum number of vehicles can travel safely and efficiently on a highway, he calculated, if they maintain a speed of 15 miles per hour.) And an astonishing discovery—the tattered address book he had kept atop his desk in Fleetwood containing the addresses of physicist Georg von Hevesy, his old balloonist companion; of Fordham colleagues McNiff, Weber, and Kovach; and, to be sure, those of prize students Braddock, Dunn, and McDonald.

Grandpa Hess would be surprised to learn that records of his work occupy 34 cubic feet in Fordham’s archives. He also would be surprised to find more women than men walking the Rose Hill campus. And I’m guessing that he would be pleasantly surprised that solar panels and a wind turbine are planned for the roof of Freeman Hall—while, as my son John the architect observed, the green and leafy Gothic-style campus appears virtually changeless, despite all its well-concealed modernization. A place of faith and reason, and beauty.

Ethan, who’s in ninth grade (my age in the middle of my Fordham-visiting years) googled Victor Francis Hess when he got home and promptly advised us, “He died on December 17. That’s my birthday!” Should I have been surprised? Grandpa Hess lives on.

Next August, Victor Hess will be remembered throughout the world as the scientific explorer who, 100 years earlier, made a series of historic flights—in what essentially was a flying basket—to demonstrate the existence of cosmic radiation. He will be remembered for his enduring love of nature, for his exploration of nature, and for his love of the Creator of nature.

He will also be remembered, by me, as the person who signed his letters, “Your loving Grandpa.”

—Bill Breisky is a former associate editor of The Saturday Evening Post. From 1978 to 1995, he was the editor of the Cape Cod Times.

One hundred years ago, on Aug. 28, 1911, Victor Hess took to the skies in a hot-air balloon to begin the work that would earn him a Nobel Prize in Physics.

At the time, scientists were puzzled by the fact that the air in electroscopes (instruments used to detect electrical charges) would often become electrically charged no matter how well the containers were insulated. Most physicists believed radioactivity from ground minerals was responsible for this. They suspected that the ionization levels in the atmoshere would diminish greatly at higher altitudes.

Enter a Jesuit scientist. In 1910, Theodor Wulf, S.J., measured ionization at the bottom and top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. He found that ionization levels were puzzlingly higher at the top of the tower, some 300 meters above ground. But his results were not given unqualified acceptance by the scientific community, nor were the experiments of other scientists who made balloon ascents to record ionization. Their instruments developed defects at high altitudes, casting doubt on their measurements.

Victor Hess, a postdoctoral student at the University of Vienna, was in his late 20s, an accomplished balloonist, a dedicated scientist and an adventurous spirit. He had read about Father Wulf’s experiments and speculated that the main source of radiation could be located in the atmosphere rather than in the Earth.

But before he took to the skies, he did two key things: He determined the height at which ground radiation should stop producing ionization (approximately 500 meters), and he designed his instruments so they would not be damaged by temperature or pressure changes as he went up in his balloon. He then made 10 daring ascents—two in 1911, seven in 1912 and one in 1913—rising to more than 17,000 feet above ground to take his measurements.

What Hess found confirmed Father Wulf’s measurements. The radiation levels increased the higher he climbed. In fact, Hess found that the ionization rate increased approximately fourfold over the rate on the ground. He interpreted these results to mean that radiation enters the atmosphere from outer space.

We now know that cosmic rays are actually high-energy particles that flow into our solar system from far away in the galaxy. But at the time, of course, no one really believed radiation could be coming from a celestial source. Hess had ruled out the sun as the source of the radiation, as he made several of his balloon ascents at night and one during a total eclipse.

“The results of my observation,” he concluded, “are best explained by the assumption that a radiation of a very great penetrating power enters our atmosphere from above.”

This was the discovery that would earn him a 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics. Two years later, Hess arrived at Fordham. In his lab in Freeman Hall, he helped develop a method for detecting minute traces of radium in the body. A company hired him to test its radium-dial workers—women who hand-painted watch dials so that the faces would glow at night. It was probably some of the first environmental testing of its kind in the workplace.

In 1958, Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., president of Fordham, presented Hess with the University’s highest honor, the Fordham University Insignis Medal.

“He has ever been zealous to develop in his students the love of research and the tireless dedication to it which have always marked his life,” the citation reads. “Both as explorer of the secrets God has hidden in nature, and as interpreter of those secrets to his students and to the world, Professor Hess has given a notable example of how the curiosity of the true scientist and the faith of the devout Catholic can dwell harmoniously under one roof.”

—Martin A. Sanzari, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of the Engineering Physics Program, Fordham University

On April 14, Fordham University held a day to honor Hess, its only Nobel Laureate, who received the esteemed international award 75 years ago for his discovery of cosmic particles.

Speaking to an audience of 137 on the Rose Hill campus, Martin Sanzari, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics, called Hess a courageous, dedicated scientist for whom the sky became the limit—literally.

As a post-doctoral student at the University of Vienna, Hess conducted a series of ionization experiments in hot air balloons inspired by the scientist Theodor Wulf, S.J.

In 1910, Father Wulf had measured ionization (electrical charge) levels at the bottom and the top of the 985-foot Eiffel Tower. While most scientists believed ionization was caused by radioactivity from ground minerals, Father Wulf’s experiment showed that ionization levels were puzzlingly higher at the top of the tower than at the bottom.

Father Wulf’s findings were not confirmed scientifically until Hess made a dramatic series of hot air balloon experiments over three years, from 1911 to 1913. On 10 separate trips, Hess went as high as 17,500 feet in a small balloon to measure ionization; what he found was that, at the height of several miles, ionization increased rapidly.

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Hess, right, prior to one of his ten balloon trips to measure atmospheric ionization levels.

Hess concluded that radiation must be entering the atmosphere from outer space, and he named the phenomenon “cosmic radiation,” also called “cosmic rays.”

“At this time, scientists had no idea that this phenomenon possibly existed,” Sanzari said. “This was the discovery that would win him the 1936 Nobel Prize in physics.”

In 1938, Hess, a Catholic married to a Jew, was tipped off by a sympathetic Gestapo officer that he was in danger of Nazi persecution if he stayed in Austria. The Hesses swiftly immigrated to New York, where the Jesuits at Fordham offered Hess a full professorship, Sanzari said.

Hess’ Fordham-based research flourished until his retirement in 1956 and even beyond, said Sanzari. He was tapped to conduct the first tests for radioactive fallout in the United States following the bombing of Hiroshima. At the request of the City of New York, Hess joined a consortium of scientists to investigate the science of producing artificial rain.

He also co-developed a method for detecting minute traces of radium in the human body.

Based on his expertise, Hess was hired by a company to test its radium dial workers—women who hand-painted watch dials so that the faces would glow at night—for radiation levels in their bodies. Hess determined that the workers were being dangerously exposed, Sanzari said.

“This testing was probably some of the first environmental testing of its kind,” he said.

In 1958, the University presented Hess with its highest honor, the prestigious Insignis Medal, which is awarded to “Catholic leaders for extraordinary distinction in the service of God through excellent performance in their professions.” Hess continued to do research at Fordham as professor emeritus until his death in 1964.

In 2008, Hess was feted again by the University when he was made a member of Fordham’s Hall of Honor. A plaque that bears his name hangs in the lobby of Rose Hill’s administration building.

“There are only a few universities in the country who have had a Nobel Prize winner on their faculty,” said Martin Sanzari, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics and the event organizer. “This 75th anniversary is a great opportunity for us to celebrate it.”

To pay homage to Hess’ research, Mark Alford, Ph.D., professor of physics at Washington University, delivered a keynote lecture on the area of Hess’ expertise: cosmology and particle physics.

“We scientists all hope that we, too, might make a difference of Hess’ level in the world,” Alford said.

Nash told the audience that such financial crises would be less likely to occur if there was some international monetary standard, such as the gold standard or competition among worldwide currencies, to curb inflation and prevent the rise of mortgage abuses. He expressed some skepticism about a government bailout as a solution.

“I get the impression that the government is not ready to do anything that is really beyond a short-term basis,” said Nash, a senior research mathematician at Princeton. “[But] we need a natural stability of value.”

Nash said that various interest groups that subscribe to Keynesian, or short-term, economic theories have sold the public on the notion that inflation is acceptable or that “bad money is better than good money.” Such a notion, he said, led to the dangerous proliferation of bad mortgage loans—loans made on the gamble that house values would continue to rise and eventually turn a profit.

“A fixed-rate 30-year mortgage would be reasonable under the gold standard,” Nash said. “Now, there are variable rates, and adjustables, and convertibles, and it is very complicated” for homeowners to figure out what they are getting into. In fact, Nash said, nobody really knows the depth of the financial crisis.

Having an internationally oriented money standard would promote better quality currencies and less inflation, he added.

Nash further said that any such new international monetary system should be democratically determined, and cited the recent vote in Sweden not to abandon the Krona for the Euro.

Nash shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize with two other economists for research in game theory, a method of predicting behavior in strategic social situations and a tool now widely used by economists and biologists. His academic notoriety was catapulted into celebrity status in 2001 when he and his wife, Alicia, became the subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won four. The movie, part of which was filmed in the basement of Keating Hall, documents Nash’s seminal contributions to game theory and mathematics and his subsequent 25-year struggle with schizophrenia.

The event was also attended by special guest Charles Soludo, Ph.D., governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Dominick Salvatore, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Economics, introduced Nash and Saludo to the standing-room-only crowd and concurred with the need for a new international regulatory system more in tune with today’s global economy.  “The entire financial sector has to be regulated, but those regulations cannot be specific,” Salvatore said. “Money is fungible. You have to be comprehensive, but general.”

Reform starts at home, Salvatore argued. “We need less exotic derivatives and much more transparency. And the U.S. has to live within its means. We save practically nothing at the individual level . . . we have a huge trade deficit and we are mortgaging our future.”

The event was part of the Distinguished Lecture Series hosted by Fordham’s Center for International Policy Studies.