Word: cosmical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...long as man stays well down inside the atmosphere, he is protected from the buffetings of space. But what happens when he goes beyond this protection, as he probably soon will, in his high-flying airplanes and higher-flying rockets? For one thing, powerful cosmic rays will strike him oftener. Scientists have a lot to learn about cosmic rays, and much of what they already do know is carefully enfogged in military secrecy. But last week came two hints of what the scientists...
...neutrons, those subtle particles that slip into atomic nuclei and often disrupt them with bangs of radiation. He found plenty of neutrons. The higher he flew the more he found. They were not invaders from space, his studies told him, but were spattered out of atmospheric nuclei struck by cosmic rays...
...temperate zone, Dr. Simpson found, the neutrons are thicker than in the tropics. This is because cosmic rays are charged particles (probably protons), and are therefore herded away from the equator by the earth's magnetic field. As Dr. Simpson's plane flew north, he could tell its latitude fairly accurately by his neutron-counting instruments. But he would not say whether variations in the "neutron field" could be used to steer guided missiles around the earth. "This question," he said, "is being investigated...
Meteor Measuring. B295 cannot fly above the effective top of the atmosphere, and rockets, so far, have not stayed up long enough to be thoroughly bombarded by free-striking cosmic rays. But meteors have been cruising through space without atmospheric protection for millions, perhaps billions, of years. If examined soon after they hit the earth, they should show the worst that cosmic rays...
This figure (6 BEV) has a thrilling, musical ring to the ears of nuclear physicists. The 184-inch cyclotron at Berkeley generates only about 350 MEV (million electron volts). With this comparatively puny force, it creates mesons, the mysterious particles knocked out of matter by cosmic rays from space. The new cyclotron will give its protons so much energy that they will act like the "primary" cosmic rays themselves, which slam through the earth's atmosphere and plunge deep into the ground. These wild invaders from space have never before been caged in laboratories. No one can guess what...