Visitor

Among other notables who mourned Albert Abraham Michelson (see col. 3) was Sir James Hopwood Jeans. British mathematician. He and Lady Jeans had gone to Pasadena a fortnight ago so that Sir James could see at first hand the "red shift" (lengthening rays of light) which Dr. Hubble has observed through the Mount Wilson telescopes. Sir James has calculated that the Universe is expanding at a tremendous rate and in some far future eon will disintegrate. The lengthening of stellar rays seems to prove his thesis, which is the opposite of Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan's.

Dr. Millikan believes that the Universe is constantly regenerating itself. His chief evidence is the cosmic ray, most penetrating known. The energy which this ray carries, he figures, is just the amount which would be released when four atoms of hydrogen, the primeval element, combined to form one helium atom.

Last week, two days before Dr. Michelson died, Dr. Millikan and Sir James joined in a comparative exposition at California Institute of Technology. Sir James's rebuttal to Dr. Millikan's synthesis argument was that as each proton pops away from the core of an exploding atom it generates a cosmic ray. Dr. Millikan agreed that this reasoning might be correct. Nonetheless, he held tenaciously to his own hypothesis.

The Jeanses left Pasadena last week (before the Michelson funeral and cremation) for Washington (a Carnegie Institution talk) and Philadelphia (where he will get the Franklin Institute's medal). Then he will lecture at Princeton, Yale, Harvard. He accepted another appointment, the Scientific Monthly's invitation to expound the Universe to Manhattanites the evening before be sails back to England.* Between lectures the Jeanses plan a visit with Lady Jeans's mother, Mrs. Annie Tiffany Mitchell of New London. Fellow guests at the Mitchell home will be Senator & Mrs. Hiram Bingham of New Haven. Senator Bingham was a preceptor in history and and politics at Princeton when when Sir James James was was professor of applied mathematics there. Lady Jeans and Mrs. Bingham are are sisters.

*Co-sponsors with the Scientific Monthly are N. Y. Museum of Science & Industry, American Institute, American Museum of Natural History, Amateur Astronomers' Assn., N. Y Academy of Science.

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