Word: comptons
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...Louis. But for most of the audience it marked the end of the "mystery" of cosmic rays, wrote finis to one of the most reverberating scientific controversies of the century. The tall, rugged man with deep-set eyes and heavy chin who was reading a paper was Arthur Holly Compton. Newshawks esteem this topflight physicist and Nobel Prizewinner of the University of Chicago for his ability to get things said without benefit of polysyllables. His address last week was understandable to anyone who knew what photons and ions are. He introduced one hybrid term of his own devising: isocosms...
First Finder. Like a good scientist Dr. Compton thought it best to begin at the beginning: "In order to place the results of the recent studies of cosmic rays in appropriate perspective, let us recall very briefly their early history. It is well known how at the beginning of the present century. . . ." At the beginning of the present century Geitel of Germany, experimenting with a quartz-fibre electroscope, noticed that for no apparent reason the air in his instrument gradually became more electrified or ionized. Later experimenters discovered that thick screens of lead or water shut out some...
...this point Arthur Holly Compton, already a crowned king of terrestrial radiation, leaped into the cosmic quest. He had an impatient desire to collect a mass of far-flung recordings with the greatest possible speed. Eight cooperating expeditions were to measure the rays in Greenland, Denmark, India, Ceylon, Java, Tibet, South Africa, Eritrea, Spitsbergen, Switzerland. One man was to make records from Peru around the Cape of Good Hope to the U. S. Two Compton men were killed trying to scale Mt. McKinley in Alaska. Dr. Compton himself, with his wife and elder son, set out on a cosmic search...
Retreat. At this stage the problem reached the midwinter convention of the A. A. A. S. at Atlantic 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...
...Stetson explained that there are two conflicting theories, Arthur Compton, of the University of Chicago, believing that cosmic rays are chiefly made up of electrons, and Millikan believing that they are chiefly made up of photons, bundles of light energy...