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A Turn: Things are not as they are Assumed to be

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Celestial Messengers

Part of the book series: Astronomers' Universe ((ASTRONOM))

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Abstract

The current belief was that cosmic rays were simply photons of greater energy than the ones observed in radioactive transformations. In fact, still in 1929, the German literature usually referred to cosmic rays as Ultragammastrahlung (ultra-gamma radiation). The reason is that the most penetrating radiations known at those times were the gamma rays from radioactive substances. Indeed, the mean free path of gamma ray photons emitted by these substances in air were hundreds of metres, while beta rays of similar energies had ranges of a few metres only, and the ranges of alpha particles were even shorter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One should assign these beta rays to the secondary electrons created by Hess ultra gamma rays.

  2. 2.

    Enrico Fermi was born in 1901 in Rome. He studied at the Scuola Normale di Pisa earning his PhD in physics in 1924. After spending some time abroad in Gottingen and Leiden he returned in Italy where he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Roma. He performed outstanding work both in theoretical and experimental physics and created at the Physics Institute in via Panisperna in Roma a very famous group of young researchers (later called “I ragazzi di via Panisperna”). His main contributions are the beta decay theory, the discovery of slow neutrons and of the reactions produced by them. In 1938, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics and in the same year migrated in the United States, first at Columbia University (1939–1942) and then at Chicago University. There he constructed the first atomic reactor in 1942. He died in 1954 in Chicago.

  3. 3.

    The use of three aligned counters was already proposed by M.A. Tuve [26] and L.M. Mott-Smith [27].

  4. 4.

    The underlined text is in italics in the paper.

  5. 5.

    The theory was discussed also in Millikan [50].

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  1. Dipartimento di Scienze di Base e Applicate per l’Ingegneria (SBAI), University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy

    Mario Bertolotti

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Bertolotti, M. (2013). A Turn: Things are not as they are Assumed to be. In: Celestial Messengers. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28371-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28371-0_4

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