Word: comptons
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...Compton Effect. In his teens Arthur built a glider that actually flew, published articles on aeronautics, made an astronomical clock for a telescope, took pictures of Halley's comet. He got his Ph.D. at Princeton with a dazzling record. After two years of industrial research on lamps for Westinghouse, he said to his wife, "Betty, I'm going back to university work." This was something of a gamble, but he landed a research fellowship at Cambridge under Lord Rutherford. He was appointed head of the physics department at Washington University (St. Louis), went from there to Chicago...
...measurements of x-ray wave lengths convinced Compton that such rays, although a form of light, could act like bullets as well as waves. If on colliding with gas atoms they lost part of their energy as bullets, they should recoil as waves weaker in intensity and hence longer in wave length. In addition they should kick electrons out of the gas. With apparatus so sensitive that it measured one ten-millionth of the energy of a mosquito climbing an inch of screen, he showed that this was true. This "Compton effect" went far to explain photo-electricity...
With his wife and two sons. Dr. Compton lives in Chicago in a big brick house filled with souvenirs of their world tour. He does not know the taste of hard liquor, almost never smokes, always offers a cigaret to women visitors. He plays such a bang-up game of tennis that he sometimes has a hard time finding worthy opponents. Several times a month he puts in an evening of mandolin-playing with three friends. When his graduate students have finished an examination, he likes to dine them and take them to the theatre...
...deacon in the Baptist Church, Dr. Compton attends nearly every Sunday, is actively interested in missions, Y. M. C. A. and settlement work. Like Britain's Eddington, he sees in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (which avers that the behavior of electrons is unpredictable) evidence that man is not an automaton in a mechanistic universe, but a free agent responsible to his Creator. "Science can have no quarrel," says Arthur Compton. ''with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are as His children...
Sylvia Scarlett, taken from Compton Mackenzie's novel of 1918, is a story of a set of people whom the main stream of life has pushed a little to one side, sharpening and coloring them unforgettably in the process. It is made memorable by a role that almost steals the show from Miss Hepburn's androgyne: Cary Grant's superb depiction of the cockney...