Millikan's Cosmic Rays

Again last week Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan reiterated that the universe is constantly being regenerated. Sir James Hopwood Jeans, and others, argue that it is blowing into wavy smithereens. While 100 members and guests (including Professors Albert Einstein and Willem de Sitter) listened, Dr. Millikan presented latest evidence for his theory.

There is a very powerful, very penetrating ray which reaches earth from space. Dr. Millikan recognized this ray ten years ago and called it the cosmic ray. He found that it penetrated 50 ft. of lead, 200 ft. of water. Last year Professor Auguste Piccard, cruising into the stratosphere ten miles above earth, found evidence of the same ray (TIME, June 8). Also last year Professor Arthur Holly Compton found traces of them atop the Rocky Mountains and the Alps.

Cosmic rays exist. How they are formed and where are the great conundrums.

Size of the rays is nearly infinitesimal. But the energy with which they are propelled is tremendous. Dr. Carl Anderson of Caltech estimates, by observing how cosmic rays shattered certain atoms in his laboratory, that cosmic rays strike earth with 50,000,000 or more volts of power. The effect is analogous to a quill being driven through a plank by a tornado.

Energies of that vast order are released when in a blazing star a heavy atom of matter sheds protons and electrons and becomes a lighter element.

A similar jolt of energy would bolt from a light-weight atom at the instant it acquired energy by merging with another light atom or by accumulating raw energy from circumambient space.

In the first case, cosmic rays would originate in stars, would be the death wails of matter--the Jeans view.

In the second case, the cosmic rays would originate in the cold, invisible space between stars, would be the birth cries of matter--the Millikan view.

Dr. Anderson's 50,000,000-volt rays prove him right, reasoned Dr. Millikan last week. He figures that at the interstellar birth of a helium atom 70,000,000 volts would be released; for oxygen 116,000,000 volts; for silicon 216,000,000 volts; for iron 450,000,000. Those are, he is convinced, the only elements floating between the stars in sufficient quantities to produce radiation effective on earth. Radiations from helium, oxygen and silicon do not reach the earth because the atmosphere damps them. It is iron's radiation which Dr. Millikan believes his adherents and opponents have noticed. Iron's 450,000,000 volts would show on earth at about Dr. Anderson's findings.

The Anderson evidence is good in its way. To get proof from a different angle, Dr. Millikan will soon send balloons bearing registering instruments to an altitude higher than Professor Piccard's ten miles where atmosphere has less effect on cosmic rays. And Professor Compton (Dr. Millikan was his preceptor at the University of Chicago, taught him how to win a Nobel Prize) will this spring and summer make a world tour of mountain tops lugging machines too heavy for balloons.

While Professor Compton is having a high time abroad, Dr. William Francis Gray Swann, president of the American Physical Society and director of Philadelphia's Bartol Research Foundation, will take to the top of Mount Washington or Pike's Peak a cosmic ray "telescope" whose construction he revealed last week. It consists of a lead cylinder. At each end is a hollow steel sphere filled with nitrogen compressed to 100 times the weight of air at sea level. Cosmic rays ionize the imprisoned nitrogen. If the telescope is pointed at a source of the rays the gas in one sphere should be ionized less than the gas in the other. If the cylinder is swung athwart the ray, ionization should be equal in both spheres. Dr. Swann plans to swing his "telescope" to and fro until he can judge whether atoms are dying in the stars (Jeans) or are aborning between the stars (Millikan).

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