Science: Worse Confounded

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Scientists, always striving with the rest of mankind to work toward greater & greater simplicity, often fare no better than politicians, industrialists, economists and plain citizens: the longer they work, the more complex things get. Delving into the secrets of the atomic nucleus, which once seemed fairly simple, the physicists are finding a new, mysterious and baffling world. Apparently the nucleus contains all sorts of sub-atomic particles.

In 1947 two British scientists, G. D. Rochester and C. C. Butler of the University of Manchester, found mysterious tracks on photographic plates that had been exposed to cosmic rays. The tracks were of two types, and neither could be explained by any known theory. Rochester and Butler suspected that they were made by two unknown particles knocked out of an atomic nucleus, but they could not prove it conclusively.

Last week Dr. Carl David Anderson of CalTech showed the American Physical Society at Washington a series of cosmic ray pictures providing real evidence that the new particles really do exist. The pictures were made on California's 11,000-ft. White Mountain by a CalTech team working with a "cloud chamber," which records the tracks of charged particles.

One of the new particles makes a track like a "V," with two branches spreading from a single point in space. Therefore, said Anderson, the particle is neutral (while still whole it leaves no track in the cloud chamber), and it disintegrates into two charged particles that do leave tracks. The second new particle has a charge, and therefore leaves a track. But the track has an angle in it, indicating that the original particle turns (at the angle) into two particles, one with a charge and one neutral.

Both of the new particles, Anderson calculated, "live" for only about three ten-billionths of a second before they disintegrate. So far, not much more is known about either of the particles. Said Dr. Anderson: "This is as important a thing as you can hope to find in physics. Apparently the Creator does not favor a world of too great simplicity."