In the Open COSMIC MYSTERY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 24 December 1945, Page 6

In the Open COSMIC MYSTERY

(By I. W. T. Munro) Two groups of Russian scientists have, according to recent cable news, discovered some more highly technical facts about cosmic rays. One group took their instruments very nearly as high as any one can climb on earth; that was in the Pamirs, “The Roof of the World.” The other group have been exploring the stratosphere from a balloon in an airtight sphere like that in which Professor Auguste Piccard, in 1931, attained an altitude of nearly ten mile 3to investigate the same mystery that the Russian scientists have been studying, the mystery of the cosmic rays. This mystery has kept the scientists busy for forty years past. It seemed quite a piffling matter at first. Sir Ernest Rutherford, at McGill University, Montreal, wondered how electricity leaked out of a charged electroscope surrounded by perfectly dry air, which, theoretically, should be a nonconductor. The only possible explanation was that some form of radiation, presumably emanating from minute quantities of radium in the soil, was knocking electrons ou* of the atoms of air. COSMIC BOMBARDMENT The theory that these rays emanated from matter within the earth was exploded when electro-scopes sunk 300 ft down in the waters of snow-fed lakes in the Sierras still showed the same effect, and the world learned to its surprise that we are under continuous bombardment from space with minute particles that pass at terrific speed right through our boo es; but, though an atom or two of our substance is from time to time, shattered by these cosmic bullets, we never notice it. One of the leading investigators, Professor R. A. Millikan, pointing out that a helium atom contains exactly the same ingredients as f:>ur hydrogen atoms, but its weight is equal to only 3.97 hydrogen atoms, suggested that when helium was formed out of hydrogen somewhere in sp* I — - , the missing fraction of weight escaped as radiation. Cosmic rays were, he said, “the birthcries of atoms,” and showed that “the Creator is still on the job. Later, however, it was shown that cosmic rays had energies of thousands of millions of volts and no atom known is heavy enough to produce radiation of such terrific energy even if it were entirely annihilated.