ROMANCE OR SCIENCE r 



By Pall R. IIkyl 

 U. 8. Bureau of Standards 



The text for my discourse is taken from the editorial columns of 

 the New York Times for September 18, 1932. 



Your physicist is supposed to be a hard, matter-of-fact measurer who sup- 

 presses romantic specuhition aud tallis ouly of energy, volts, ions, and electrons. 

 Confront him with a mystery aud he proves to be as human as the rest of us. 

 Consider the cosmic rays. For years Milliken in this country aud Kulhoerster, 

 Hess, Regener, and others in Europe have been studying them only to their 

 own mystification and ours. Measuring instruments are dropped into lakes a 

 thousand feet or elevated 20 miles above sea level. Piccard imperils his life 

 to determine the true nature of the rays. Professor Compton and a devoted 

 band of physicists station themselves at the Equator, in the far north, on 

 mountain tops, in deep mines to conduct their investigations. And the result? 

 Rumance — slieer romance. 



Milliken spins a tale of electrons and protons combining in space, and of 

 resultant cosmic rays that proclaim the continuous upbuilding of the universe, 

 contrary to all the laws of thermodynamics. Jeans holds us spellbound with a 

 poem about stars dying in a fierce radiance and boud)arding us with cosmic 

 rays in the process. Regener, as practical as the Irish foreman of a railway 

 section gang when it comes to counting ions, looks at his equations as into a 

 crystal and sees the beginning of things — sees primitive stars shedding cosmic 

 rays and suffusing a relativistic universe from whicli they cannot escape be- 

 cause it is closed and finite. Stimulated by him, others imagine that, just as 

 the bones of a dinosaur tell us something of the life that was on earth a few 

 million years ago, so these fossil cosmic rays reveal the Almighty in the act of 

 fashioning electrons and protons into nebulae, suns, planetary systems, and man 

 himself. 



For all the instruments and methods invented to test the cosmic rays, the 

 physicist Is still the medicine man from whom he is descended. Electroscopes 

 and ionization chambers and other cosmic-ray measuring instruments seem 

 strangely like wands and totem poles, and Einsteiniau equations but incanta- 

 tions that make us believe we know more than we really do. That we are 

 actually dealing with something like wishfulfillments in the cosmic rays is evi- 

 denced by the results obtained. Here is Milliken convincing himself that the 

 cosmic rays prove that the universe is self-perpetuating. And Compton, adopt- 

 ing precisely the same methods, reaches the conclusion that the rays are only 

 electrons swerving to the poles because the earth is a great spinning magnet. 



» Address dcllvorod before a joint meeting of the Wasliinp;ton Academy of Selonces and 

 the Philosoplilcal Society of WashinKton, Dec. l."), 1932. Reprinted by pprniissioQ from 

 Journal of The Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 23, no. 2, Feb. 15, 1933. 



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