A PANTHEON OF SCIENCE
The Building of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, which is also the home of Science Service, has been the scene during the past week of the annual spring meeting of the National Academy.
This building, which is one of the masterpieces of the architectural genius of the late Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, is universally acknowledged to be a creation of unique beauty in Washington, which is a city of beautiful structures. In its general outline it is simple as its austere and majestic neighbor, the Lincoln Memorial; but when one comes to look at it more nearly and at leisure, one comes upon an endless fund of carefully wrought detail, every item bespeaking the combination of richness and deliberate restraint that is the mark of a well-tempered finely edged civilization.
COSMIC RAYS SIGNAL MATTER’S CREATION
Somewhere out in the reaches of the stellar universe, chemical elements, like oxygen, silicon, and iron, common here on earth, and helium, abundant in the heavens, are being made. First evidences of the wholesale continuous creation of matter were presented by Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, Nobel prize winner and California physicist, in a leading address to the National Academy of Sciences meeting at Washington. Cosmic rays, oscillating a hundred times more rapidly than the most powerful rays hitherto known, are given off when the matter is formed and they brought the news to earth to be detected by Dr. Millikan and his associate Dr. G. Harvey Cameron. The stuff out of which these elements are made are primordial electrons, the positive ones which are the nuclei or hearts of the simplest of the elements, hydrogen, and the negative ones which are the essence of electricity.
This startling discovery of the creation of matter, long desired in the theoretical thinking of physicists, arose from the discovery last fall that the cosmic ray spectrum is not continuous, like the visible light, but banded. The highest frequency or shortest wavelength band has so enormous a penetrating power that it passes through 200 feet of water or 18 feet of lead before being absorbed. Dr. Millikan and his fellow physicists sent balloons miles high in the air, probed the depths of mountain lakes and climbed the Andes while discovering the properties of the strange and powerful radiation from outer space.
MICROSUPERSONICS
Supersonic waves, which are rays of sound waves vibrating too rapidly to be heard, have now been brought under such control that observers can watch their effects through a high-power microscope. Using a small electrically driven crystal to produce these waves at a rate of 406,000 a second, Prof. E. Newton Harvey of Princeton University and Alfred L. Loomis of Tuxedo Park, N.Y., have watched blood corpuscles warp, twist and disintegrate, and have seen the living protoplasm in plant cells whirl in a dance of death, faster and faster until it has separated into spinning bits, broken and disorganized.
copyright 1998 Science Service