New & True

For ten years cosmic rays have made a pother in the scientific news. Hardly less of a pother has Caltech's famed Robert Andrews Millikan made by his controversies with colleagues who did not see his cosmic ray theories as he did. By last fortnight Dr. Millikan had decided that laymen interested in cosmic rays were being hopelessly confused by the tangle of-fact and conjecture reported by numerous researchers.

"This situation," Dr. Millikan said at the Pittsburgh meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (TIME, Jan. 7), "is not improved by the existence of the daily newspaper, which ... is under a greater pressure to find for its pages something that is new rather than something that is true. I venture the prediction that our present age, because of its craze for the new regardless of the true, will be looked back upon by our children's children with . . . amazement and ridicule." Dr. Millikan added that when nine-tenths of the workers in a field agree on a point, the point becomes "established."

Next day the capacious New York Times, which probably carries more science news than any other U. S. daily, printed Dr. Millikan's remarks without comment. Last week, however, the Times got around to retorting to Dr. Millikan in a 600-word editorial. Points:

1) The common criticism that newspapers print too much scandal, crime & sport sets in a strange light the Millikan criticism of news of educational interest.

2) Newspapers cannot be expected to set themselves up as judges of the truth of theories and the merits of discoveries, or take a census to see if nine-tenths of a scientist's colleagues agree with him.

3) If newspapers printed only what was scientifically beyond controversy, they would be almost confined to "such things as the multiplication table."

4) "The function of the newspaper is primarily to report what the leading scientists do and say. If they contradict each other, and there is confusion, the newspapers merely picture the confusion and do not create it."

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