Word: masses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...recent months Carl David Anderson of California Institute of Technology has been experimenting with a peculiar particle which showed up in the cosmic rays reaching earth. It appeared that this "X-particle" had a considerably higher mass than m, so Dr. Anderson, who had a natural and profound respect for the constancy of m, was quite sure it was not an electron. Jabez Curry Street of Harvard measured the X-particle's mass at 130 times m, although he said it might be subject to a 25% error either...
Some weeks ago George Eric MacDonnell Jauncey got a hunch that the X-particle was originally an ordinary electron whose mass had somehow been increased. He imagined what would happen if a high-energy cosmic ray photon struck an electron in the upper atmosphere. Most of the transferred energy would simply give the electron a high-velocity kick. But some of it might be converted into matter which the electron would absorb, increasing its mass. The increase might be any amount at all, depending on the initial energy of the cosmic ray and the variable quantity of matter produced...
Then it occurred to him that perhaps the electrons emitted on earth by cathode ray tubes and radioactive substances might be variable in mass, too. If this tremendous hunch were true, some bothersome discrepancies in the behavior of beta rays (fast electrons) shooting out of radium would be cleared up. Also it would make the concept of the neutrino unnecessary. The neutrino is a hypothetical particle imagined by physicists as a carrier of energy which mysteriously disappears when one element is transmuted into another. If it is assumed that the vanished energy has taken the form of greater mass...
...Jauncey cudgeled his brain for some way to verify experimentally the variable mass of electrons. On December 18 he hit on the idea of passing the electrons from Radium E through a velocity selector, then into a magnetic field. If the particles, selected for uniform velocity, were also of uniform mass, they should be uniformly curved by the field and would strike a photographic film in the same place. By that time the physics department at Washington University was so excited that Jauncey was offered the run of the laboratory and all the help he wanted. He stayed...
...these houses still look strangely civilized and sheltered, with low vistas and wide-spreading eaves. "Taking a human being for my 'scale,' " Wright has said, "I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one-ergo, 5' 8" tall, say. ... I broadened the mass out all I possibly could, brought it down into spaciousness. ... I was working toward the elimination of the wall as a wall to reach the function of a screen, as a means of opening up space. . . . The planes of the building parallel to the ground were all stressed-to grip...