Cosmic Quest

At Los Angeles next week the Nobel Laureate of the University of Chicago. Dr. Arthur Holly Compton hopes, if he has time, to say farewell to the Nobel Laureate of the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan. Accompanied by Mrs. Compton and their elder son Arthur Alan, he will start on a 20,000-mi. tour of Pacific mountain tops. To the tops of mountains in Panama, Peru, New Zealand, Hawaii and Alaska he will lug a 250-lb. machine to study the characteristics of the puzzling cosmic rays which Dr. Millikan has made his own. The study will supplement similar studies which Dr. Compton made in the Rocky Mountains last summer, in the Alps last October.

Cosmic rays may be evidence of cosmic construction (Millikan theory) or cosmic disintegration (Jeans theory). They may be the neutrons which Dr. James Chadwick of Cambridge University found bombarded out of beryllium (TIME, March 7) and which Dr. H. C. Webster of the University of Bristol last week reported that he had knocked from boron and fluorine.*

Whatever the cosmic rays are, Dr. Compton is betting the next six months of his life that he will learn enough actual facts about them better to describe the innermost construction of all matter, in the study of which he is one of the world's top-notchers.

The University of Chicago was worried about Dr. Compton for a while this winter. He is one of ten professors at Chicago who have been awarded Distinguished Service Professorships ($10,000 yearly minimum). President John Grier Hibben of Princeton is currently 70 and resigning and the Princeton trustees were pondering Dr. Compton as Dr. Hibben's successor. (Dr. Compton is one of three men who in all Princeton's history have won doctorates in physics summa cum laude. The others are Henry Norris Russell, Princeton astronomer, and Karl Taylor Compton [elder brother], president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) But young President Robert Maynard Hutchins of Chicago was persuasive. A Carnegie Foundation grant was available, and the University helped out further with equipment. So off put Distinguished Dr. Compton, not to Princeton, but to Panama and Peru on cosmic quest.

* It is noteworthy that neutrons have been recognized as coming from elements which are the lightest of their groups in the Periodic System. Beryllium is the lightest of the earth alkali group (beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium, radium). Boron is lightest of the earth metals (boron, aluminum, scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, actinium). Fluorine is lightest of the halogens (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine and, newly recognized, alabamine).

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