Matter Out of Motion

Press dispatches from California Institute of Technology last week described "the creation of matter out of pure motion." The impression given was that this was a brand new accomplishment. Actually it was only a bold recapitulation of work done the past two years.

By calculations from the Einstein formula and measurements of the energies of cosmic rays, Caltech's Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan reached the disputed conclusion that interstellar energy is constantly accumulating in the form of the familiar elements.

Physicists have wanted to see energy in the process of becoming mass. Photographs of the tracks of electric particles passing through fog chambers exist to prove the transformation, which can be accomplished in three ways:

1) In Paris the Jean Frederic Joliots (daughter & son-in-law of Mme Marie Sklodowska Curie) projected alpha particles at lithium atoms. From each collision they recovered a boron atom and a neutron, which together weighed more than the original lithium atom and alpha particle. Dr. Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge of the Bartol Research Foundation showed that the additional weight must have come from the energy which propelled the alpha particle at the lithium atom.

2) The Joliots suggested that the added energy might also have come from gamma rays which accompanied the alpha particle crashes. Gamma rays, like visible light, represent unaffiliated energy in motion. Caltech and Cambridge (England) scientists developed the Joliot thought. They aimed gamma rays at the hard nuclei of atoms. The gamma rays disappeared and two new entities appeared--ponderable electrons and positrons.

3) In addition, Dr. Carl David Anderson bounced positrons off atom nuclei. Neither nuclei nor positrons seemed affected. But from their collisions appeared fresh electrons, which could have come only by synthesis of the energy which projected the positrons.

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