New Particle

In 1911 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson of Cambridge University invented a "cloud chamber" in which tracks made by sub-atomic particles could be seen. At about the same time Hans Geiger, now of the University of Tubingen, invented a cylindrical "counter" which crackles every time a particle enters it. Physicists use both devices, alone or together, to record the presence of and identify cosmic rays, gamma rays, X-rays, photons, electrons, protons, positrons, neutrons.

There is still plenty to be learned about all these forces, but that did not prevent Drs. Jabez Curry Street & Edward Carl Stevenson of Harvard from announcing last week that they had discovered a brand-new cosmic particle which the heavens rain upon the earth. It has a negative electrical charge like an electron, but seems to weigh ten times as much and have a thousand times as much energy, easily passing through four Geiger counters, two cloud chambers and seven inches of lead.

Scarcely did the Harvard men announce this news to the American Physical Society in Washington than from Pasadena came word that Dr. Carl David Anderson of California Institute of Technology, Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of the positron, had independently discovered the new entity in his laboratory.

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