With an almost cosmic calm, two great U.S. physicists, both Nobel Prizemen, last week joined again in spirited dispute over the nature of cosmic rays. The scene of the controversy was the annual meeting of Washington's National Academy of Sciences. It was not the first such dignified disagreement between devout, handsome Arthur Holly Compton, of the University of Chicago, and pious, white-crested Robert Andrews Millikan of California Institute of Technology. Several years ago Millikan reached the conclusion that cosmic rays consist of tiny, electrically neutral packets of radiation called photons. Compton insisted that they were electrically charged material particles. By 1936...
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