Space Physics from Both Ends of the Americas, 1949–2019

Abstract

though politically messed-up country and very Catholic-but I was baptized Protestant. So, I was assigned to an elective Bible class, separate from the official one. One day the teacher called my mother in for a conference and asked her to take me out of that course. Reason? Der fragt zuviel (he asks too many questions). Later, in high school in Argentina I hated history and literature classes, and in the university some lower division physics courses because they only taught me what, where, and when, but never why. This longing for the why continued during my entire life, first as a science student, then as a science teacher and researcher.I always preferred to explain old things rather than finding new ones. I always preferred pedagogy to discovery, ranking teaching higher than investigating. And in my teaching, I emphasized understanding more than knowing. I always preferred the foundations of a discipline to its applications. These most likely were the reasons for switching from experimentalist to theoretician early in my scientific career and for becoming an interdisciplinarian in science, branching into psychoacoustics and information theory-and also why as an academic administrator like institute director or dean, I always preferred explaining to the public and politicians why we were doing what, rather than peddling funding agencies for more research dollars. And in a more indirect way, it is the ultimate reason why I was so heavily involved during my entire career in international cooperation in science: If we wanted to find out why things happen the way they do in the geophysical world, we must ignore man-made boundaries.Space research in Argentina began in the late 1940s, in the historic downtown building of the School of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. Well-not exactly: the term "space research," as we now understand it, really did not exist at that time. Everything above the ionosphere was thought to be deep vacuum, except for occasional ionized hot gas and energetic charged particle bursts associated with solar activity, a tenuous flux of ultra-high energy cosmic ray particles from who knows where in the Universe, and the dipole-like remnants of the Earth's internal magnetic field. The ground-based study of time variations of the surface magnetic field, cosmic rays, auroral displays, and radio wave propagation were the only techniques available to monitor the behavior of the particle emissions from the Sun. Therefore, if somebody had introduced the term "space research" at that time, he or she indeed would have legitimately included the study of the cosmic radiation flux as an integral part of it.In 1949 I and my high school sweetheart Beatriz Cougnet-now my wife of 67 years-were physics sophomores at the University of Buenos Aires. A young teaching assistant in the Physics Department, Estrella Mazzoli de Mathov, had just returned from an international cosmic ray conference in Brazil and with much enthusiasm was telling her students about the new projects and t...