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The balloon-borne experiment that finally seems to have found one was directed by Physicists P. Buford Price, 42, and Edward Shirk, 29, of the University of California at Berkeley, and Weymar Zack Osborne, 42, and Lawrence Pinsky, 29, of the University of Houston. But credit for first spotting the monopole's track belongs to two technical assistants: Julie Teague, 31, at Houston and Walter Wagner, 25, at U.C.
Photographic film and a special emulsion layer from the research balloon were processed and the plastic sheets were exposed to a caustic solution that etched away material wherever it had been damaged by the passage of a heavy cosmic particle. The film, emulsion and plastic sheets were examined microscopically. One of the tracks where a particle had penetrated was different from all the others. Its characteristics, said the researchers, "strongly favor identification of the particle as a magnetic monopole with a charge of 137 and a mass greater than 200 times that of a proton, traveling at a velocity half that of the speed of light."
Serious Doubts. A key finding, says Price, was the velocity; the typical cosmic-ray particle travels at close to the speed of light. At half the speed of light, any known particle would have been stopped by the plastic sheets. But the newcomer had surprising heft; it had "slugged right through all 33 sheets of plastic," a clear indication that it was at least 200 times as massive as a proton.
The successful tracking of a monopole raises serious doubts about another great scientific search: the hunt for the theoretical "quark" (TIME, May 19, 1967). The existence of this strange particle was first proposed by Caltech Physicist Murray Gell-Mann. According to his equations, the quark is the basic building block of nature, the unit out of which all members of the catalogue of subatomic particles are constructed. Gell-Mann's figures assigned the quark a smaller electrical charge than the electron's. But if the latest measurements prove correct, they will support Dirac's calculations. And that means no particle like a quark with less than an electron's charge can exist independently in nature. Discovery of the monopole also means that some of the laws of quantum electrodynamics (on which electronics and laser technology are based) will have to be revised to account for the new particle.
Price and his associates speculate that the discovery could some day lead to "new medical therapies in the fight against cancer, new sources of energy, extremely small and efficient motors and generators and new particle accelerators of much higher energy than any yet built." At a Berkeley press conference last week, there was even far-out talk of equipping a great ship with a few monopoles and having the earth's magnetic field tug it across the ocean. But any such achievements require the locating and controlling of at least one monopole, which could be used, says Price, to create others by "banging it against matter" in a particle accelerator. Before that happens, scientists will need more than a photographic trace. "The goal," says Price, "is to capture a monopole and bring it back alive."