Abstract
MILNE1 suggests that the undulatory component of cosmic rays may be the remains of the radiation of very high frequency the existence of which in the remote past I postulated2 in connexion with the origin of the planets. I do not think that this idea can be accepted without a slight modification which, however, covers the particulate component as well. Consider a photon such as I postulated which had an energy of 6 × 1045 ergs at time t = 2 × 10–63 sec. If it reached the earth to-day, then at that time in the past it was in the neighbourhood of a galaxy receding from our own with almost the speed of light. Now, that is to say, with t = 6 × 1016 sec., its energy has been degraded by a factor of 3 × 10–80 by the Doppler effect, and is therefore only 2 × 10–34 erg. This is so even if it has undergone reflexion or refraction. Whereas the energies of cosmic ray photons may exceed an erg (0·6 × 1012 electron-volts) and certainly exceed 10–6 erg. Moreover, each of the postulated past photons must now be represented by a very large number of photons, perhaps of the order of 1040.
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References
Nature, 155, 135 (1945).
Nature, 155, 133 (1945).
Nature, 155, 511 (1945).
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HALDANE, J. Cosmic Rays and Kinematical Relativity. Nature 156, 266 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/156266a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/156266a0
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