Clue to Atom Smashing

Each person on earth unwittingly encounters a shower of cosmic rays about once a minute, whether indoors or out. Each shower covers two or three acres and contains from 100,000 to 1,000,000 high-speed electrical particles. Even airraid shelters, are no protection--the rays penetrate steel and concrete. But no protection is necessary. The rays are harmless.

Last week Dr. Pierre Auger, who discovered these showers at his Paris laboratory in 1938, gave a new theory of their origin to the American Physical Society, meeting at the University of Chicago. They do not come from outer space as electrons: that would require a million billion electron volts. More probably the original missile from the remote regions of the universe is a proton, a bare hydrogen nucleus moving at terrific velocity with energy of 200 million electron volts. When it strikes the earth's atmosphere it breaks up either by explosion or collision and, like an earthbound skyrocket, forms a spray of smaller particles, called mesotrons. These in turn, colliding with oxygen and nitrogen molecules of the air, produce the electron showers on earth.

The new theory was supported by Chicago's Dr. Marcel Schein, who has explored the upper atmosphere by recording instruments sent up in balloons. He proposed repeating the ascensions at the equator to find out whether the mesotrons are formed merely by the explosion of the original proton or are formed from earthly atoms by collision. This would throw light on the basic question: what does it take to break up a proton--i.e., how much energy is needed to smash an atom?

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