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...collection of atomic physics is the little thing discovered in cloud-chambers last spring by Drs. Jabez Curry Street & Edward Carl Stevenson of Harvard and by Dr. Carl David Anderson of California Institute of Technology (TIME, May 10). It does not con-form-as did the positive electron- to any mathematical predictions. Not much is known about it except that it is heavier than an electron, lighter than a proton, possessed of high penetrating power. In Denver last week Dr. Street announced that it may be positive as well as negative, that in his opinion it is not a messenger...
What got observers Street and Stevenson to thinking that a new sort of corpuscle was in the offing was that the behavior of the cosmic ray particles was not at all like the accepted manner of an electron, which characteristically forms high energy photons, which in turn form more electrons to produce the phenomena known as "electron showers." Due to these showers electrons soon lose their energy, and consequently haven't enough "push" to make much progress through lead. These newly-discovered specks, however, pass through ten centimeters of the metal almost undeviated, with little appreciable loss of energy...
...cannot be protons, since protons of the same curvature in a magnetic field produce a much thicker trail and are stopped completely at the first lead barrier, unlike the new particles, which pass through all. They cannot be neutrons (neutral particles) since they possess the same charge as the electron or the proton, although the mass is somewhere between these two. Therefore, concluded the investigators, they must be something new, and quite different...
...learned about all these forces, but that did not prevent Drs. Jabez Curry Street & Edward Carl Stevenson of Harvard from announcing last week that they had discovered a brand-new cosmic particle which the heavens rain upon the earth. It has a negative electrical charge like an electron, but seems to weigh ten times as much and have a thousand times as much energy, easily passing through four Geiger counters, two cloud chambers and seven inches of lead...
There is also a demand for the negative proton-which also fails to leave a recognizable track in ionization chambers. Neutrons have been supposed to consist of a positive proton and a negative electron jammed together, canceling the electric charges. But to explain why some neutrons had positive "spins" and some negative, Tolansky of England two years ago suggested that the negative-spinners were composed of negative protons combined with positrons. The existence of positive-negative electron mates, said he, "suggests, on grounds of symmetry, that a negative proton might be expected to exist." Anderson had also declared himself...