Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...splitting in two like the lines in a laboratory light source affected by magnetism. But Dr. Martin A. Pomerantz of the Bartol Foundation had long doubted the sun's magnetic field. Last summer he set out to disprove the theory by the apparently far-fetched method of catching cosmic rays with sounding balloons near the earth's north magnetic pole...
...When a cosmic ray (an electrically charged particle from outer space) approaches the earth, it is deflected by the earth's magnetic field. If it is speeding fast enough, it slams through this interference and plunges into the atmosphere. The most powerful particles, whose speed gives them an energy of 14 billion electron-volts, can reach the earth at the equator, where the magnetism is strongest. At the latitude of Philadelphia, two billion volts is enough...
With the backing of the National Geographic Society and the help of the Defense Research Board of Canada, Dr. Pomerantz launched high-flying balloons from Churchill on Hudson Bay. At this point of feeble earth magnetism, Geiger counters attached to the balloons found what Dr. Pomerantz was looking for: cosmic rays with only 100 million volts of energy. Such rays would be much too feeble to reach the earth from outer space if they had to break through the magnetic field attributed to the sun. Therefore, Dr. Pomerantz announced last week, the sun must be bare of permanent magnetism...
...most victims' babies died too. In other parts of the world the story was even grimmer. At Jena over a four-year period, the death toll among infection victims was 100%. Among "causes" of the fever, doctors who had never heard of the germ theory listed wounded modesty, cosmic-telluric influences, fear, bad ventilation, climate and a feeling of guilt...
Such "catastrophic" explanations of the solar system made fair sense scientifically, and got grateful support from nonscientific people who preferred to believe that man and his earthly home are unique n the universe. Collisions or near-collisions between stars must be excessively rare. If it takes such a cosmic catastrophe ;o produce a planetary system, there is a good chance that man's earth may be the only chunk of matter with proper conditions for life to develop...