Every spring, about the time the cherry blossoms open in Washington, the National Academy of Sciences there opens its great bronze doors. George Washington University and the National Bureau of Standards, with other Government bureaus, play host to the nation's scientists. Last week hundreds of them met for their annual round of scientific gossip:
Northern Visitors. Dr. Carl W. Gartlein of Cornell told the physicists how he'd taken spectrograms of auroras (northern lights) and found that some of their light comes from hydrogen ions (protons).
Scientists have known for a long time that auroras are...