Coefficient .305

To those cosmically-minded individuals who are concerned about the wasting away of the sun (TIME, March 19), comes a message of hope. Last week, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, president of the California Institute of Technology, told his institute associates that this was a continuously evolving world, rather than a steadily disintegrating one.

His latest measurements of the cosmic ray (TIME, November 23, 1925) prove it to consist of definite bands of color, like the light from a Cooper-Hewitt mercury arc, but the spectral region in which the bands occur corresponds to frequencies 100,000,000 times greater than those emitted by the Cooper-Hewitt arc. Having measured the ray, Dr. Millikan sat down to figure out its importance. He turned to Einstein's theories. He found, using the Einstein equation (M C 2-E), that the most conspicuous band in the cosmic ray spectrum is probably the same band that would be formed by the monochromatic ether wave of the radiant energy which is liberated when hydrogen unites to form an atom of helium. Einstein's figure was reached by calculation: he reasoned that if 4 atoms of hydrogen united to form helium, a definite amount of matter would go off in the form of radiant energy. This energy, appearing in the form of a monochromatic ether wave, would give that ether wave a certain penetrating power, which could be represented by an absorption coefficient of .305.

Now Physicist Millikan directly observed the absorption coefficient of the most conspicuous band in the cosmic ray spectrum. It was within a few per cent .305. Things equal to the same thing being equal to each other, it seems that positive and negative electrons are daily uniting in the heavens to form helium and sending us a free cosmic ray as an announcement.

Dr. Millikan cautions against rash constructions. The experiments are not yet completed and much remains to be proved, but he admits these discoveries to be the first indications that elements are being continually created from electrons. Support for this hypothesis can be found on all sides. On the side of the sun, for instance, there is an extraordinary abundance of both hydrogen and helium. What is more plausible than that the one should be created from the other? On the side of physics, there are no other nuclear changes which could take place, as far as science knows now, that would be powerful enough to produce the cosmic ray discovered by Dr. Millikan. On the side of philosophy, the tearing-down process of radio activity represented by the disintegration of heavy atoms into lighter ones, has been known for 30 years. Why, then, should there not be a building-up process represented by the creation of elements from positive and negative electrons? Dr. Millikan's experiments indicate that there is.