Word: millikan
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...beyond Earth's blanket of air. Calculation revealed them as more penetrating than the gamma rays which emerge from radium at 3,000,000 electron-volts. Stopped by the War, the cosmic ray hunt started with fresh impetus after Peace. In the U. S., brilliant, imaginative Robert Andrews Millikan of California Institute of Technology, who had won the Nobel Prize for isolating and measuring the electron, sank his recorders under 280 ft. of water in California. Some rays, after fighting their way through the atmosphere, had enough drive left to reach that depth in the lake, indicating power...
...Millikan's Photons. It seemed natural to Dr. Millikan that the cosmic rays were light rays or photons of enormously high frequency and short wave length. He concluded that they were the by-products of atom-building in interstellar space; that when light-weight atoms suddenly combined to form heavier ones, a slight excess of matter-like bricklayer's mortar scraped from the wall-was turned into high-frequency light according to the Einstein equation. To him this was a peculiarly satisfying interpretation as it bespoke "the Creator still...
Nevertheless photons are electrically neutral, are not swerved by magnetic fields. If the cosmic rays were Millikan photons, they should not tend to cluster about Earth's strongly magnetic poles, to avoid the weakly magnetic Equator. Yet a Dutchman named Clay, traveling from Holland to Java, found a drop in cosmic ray intensity at the Equator. Kolhorster took this to mean that at least some of the rays were not photons of light, but electrically charged particles of matter...
...airplane flight within 350 miles of the North Magnetic Pole. When all the data was in his hands, he found overwhelming evidence for variation by latitude, ranging up to 20%, concluded that most of the rays were electric corpuscles affected by the varying magnetic pulls of Earth. Dr. Millikan clung to his photons, alleging that the corpuscles were secondary rays knocked out of air atoms by the primary photons...
...City in 1932, which both Nobel Laureates attended. For a time the two seemed on the verge of noisy dispute (TIME, Jan. 9, 1933). Dr. Compton had found charged particles with energies of 30,000,000,000 volts, which could hardly be secondary rays dislodged from the air. Dr. Millikan said that anyone recording voltages over a billion must have muffed the technique...