Millikan Rays

For five days and five nights last summer, Dr G. Von Salis and Dr. W. Kolhoster of Switzerland sat on top of Mont Monch, which towers up to 13,465 ft. hard by the Jungfrau in the Alps. They had dug a pit twelve feet wide and 20 feet deep in the eternal ice of that summit, and lowered into it instruments extremely sensitive to radiant energy. Their procedure closely paralleled experiments conducted during 1923-25 by Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics (Pasadena, Calif.), who first buried his instruments at sea level, then flew them far aloft by kites, finally lowering them to a considerable depth in the pure waters of a high-altitude lake.* And their conclusions, announced last week, paralleled Dr. Millikan's: bombarding the earth from the surrounding universe are some hitherto unknown rays, of submicroscopic wavelength, which far surpass even the gamma rays of radium in their power to penetrate matter. They will pass through a block of steel three feet thick, through six feet of lead.

When he announced his "Millikan Rays" to the world last year, Dr. Millikan did not hazard a guess at their source. They seemed to him to be coming at the earth in all directions. In the Swiss report of last week, however, it was stated that the greatest "penetration radiation" had been detected when the pit on Mont Monch yawned directly up at the constellations Orion, Hercules and Andromeda. This observation fitted in with a theory that the Millikan Rays are the result of atoms being disintegrated during the formation of new stars, for the constellations named all contain spiral nebulosities (embryonic stars).

*These experiments must be made as far as possible out of reach of known sources of radioactivity, such as radium ores in the earth's crust, water and atmosphere.