#12: They had me at fighting physicists

I didn’t expect Joe Crosson’s 1932 flight on Denali to lead me to a bunch of feuding physicists. Then I saw this photo and, well, here we go…

1931 Rome Conference on Nuclear Physics, Robert Millikan front row with hands in pockets, Arthur Compton behind him with bow tie.

The research leap from Crosson to Allen Carpé and the 1932 Mt McKinley Cosmic Ray Expedition was obvious — Crosson flew three members of the expedition onto the mountain (which is now known as Denali), including Carpé. That was the first landing ever on the mountain and aviation has been a big part of the climbing industry there ever since.

Here’s a current pic of K2 Aviation at base camp on the mountain. (K2 flies out of Talkeetna which is home to most of Denali’s climbing support.) (I’m including this picture because it is about as Alaskan as it gets.) (I suppose we could add a bear or a wolf or a moose. But still….very Alaskan.)

My Crosson research led to the expedition and Carpé, who was the most accomplished climber in the region at that time, and then I learned Carpé and fellow climber Ted Koven were the first recorded fatalities on Denali which was a big surprise as I took History of Alaska while attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks and yet never knew anything about this expedition and that massive gap in my knowledge persuaded me to read several reports on the accident which led me to cosmic rays, the reason the expedition was on the mountain, and that got me to the photo at the top of this newsletter and the big complicated history of two world-famous physicists who ended up in a cut throat battle over cosmic ray research funding and fame. (Whew!) Those men, both Nobel Prize Winners, were Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton. It was for Compton’s research that Carpé led the expedition to Alaska.

Now back to Rome!

At the Rome conference, Compton (r) with Millikan.

The 1931 Conference on Nuclear Physics in Rome was interesting for a host of reasons starting with who attended. In one place, you’ve got Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Guglielmo Marconi, Marie Curie (she’s in black in the front row of the upper picture), Werner Heisenberg, Arnold Sommerfeld, Lise Meitner, Peter Debye — basically all the leading physicists of the era except Albert Einstein. (He apparently refused to attend out of protest over Mussolini’s demand of signed loyalty pledges from Italian professors.)

Millikan was already deep in research of cosmic rays before the conference and Compton was ramping up his interest but the conflict between them really started because Bruno Rossi, who was very young and just starting his career, presented some of his own cosmic ray research at the conference and included some oblique references to Millikan’s habit of leaping to conclusions. Compton noticed an opening for his work, Millikan was furious (and according to Rossi never spoke to him again), and things quickly got intense. Personally, while reading about all this the first time, I stalled at the whole notion of cosmic rays and how these guys found themselves fighting over who had the preferential right to research a scientific phenomena that many physicists and others had been talking about for twenty years.

Quick definition of Cosmic Rays

When I realized I was wandering into the history of physics (which is mighty far afield from Alaskan bush pilots and dead mountaineers), my husband went out and bought me the Carl Sagan Cosmos series (and the updated version), so I could learn about cosmic rays at a level that a nonphysicist could grasp.

Today, we know that cosmic rays are actually subatomic particles that arrive from outer space (thus “cosmic”) and occur naturally. They range in energy from the very low, which come from the sun, to much higher which have less clear origins but likely come from supernovas, or dying stars. (Some might even come from black holes.) But in 1932 we only knew they came from space, but not what they were composed of or, to put it bluntly, what they were. That is what Millikan, Compton and everyone else was devising experiments to try and figure out.

Dueling physicists become part of the story

Millikan liked to fancy himself the person who coined the term “cosmic rays” and you will see that written about him even today. Technically, it was a Vienna physicist in 1913, Victor Hess, who published a paper after his balloon experiments proved that this mysterious radiation that others had been measuring for several years was actually stronger at altitude then on the ground. He named it Hōhenstrahlung which translates as “cosmic radiation”. But then Hess and all the other European investigators involved in the topic (who ranged from physicists to school teachers) got sidetracked by World War I. Millikan was in a rather lowkey position with the US Army Signal Corps during the war and able to conduct his own experiments along with fulfilling his military duties. He had kept up with reports on cosmic radiation out of Europe and was able to proceed with his research when the Europeans were not. Then, on November 5, 1925, he spoke at the National Academy of Sciences meeting in Wisconsin and used the term “cosmic rays” while explaining his work (and making only the briefest of mentions of Hess and anyone else) and the American press went a bit crazy. Here’s a NY Times headline a few days later:

Everybody insisted that Millikan had discovered this new phenomena and he didn’t spend a lot of time telling them that he was just proving what Hess had already determined (and a lot of others had been working on). Instead, Millikan gave in to the allure of being famous. It wasn’t that tough when you consider how the media was covering him. Again, this is from the NY Times:

As it turns out, the Nobel Committee finally awarded a prize for cosmic ray discovery in 1936 and it went to Victor Hess. By then, well, things had taken a bit of a negative turn for Millikan.

But I digress.

Always follow the questions

(This is a truth as definitive as “follow the money” from All the President’s Men.)

Everywhere I looked, there was so much swirling around the 1932 Mt McKinley Cosmic Ray Expedition; so many major events, so many big personalities. But after 1932, as the squabbling physicists argued more stridently and Joe Crosson managed to become famous in his own right, Allen Carpé faded away. Along with Ted Koven, he is still in the story however, ghosts hovering in the background of what became Arthur Compton’s professional success, and Robert Millikan’s failure.

I have so many questions about why this man is not more well known.

Allen Carpé, 1925

Research can take you in all kinds of unexpected directions and before you know it, what was once just an article about a bush pilot making the first known glacier landing in history (on the tallest mountain in North America!), becomes a deep dive into the career of a great overlooked American mountaineer. Then you turn around and you’re in the midst of a mass of furious physicists trading insults and [metaphorically] stabbing backs.

What I kept thinking about in all my reading though was the nature of investigation itself. The lack of formal investigation in mountaineering has led to a lot of questions and concerns over the past century and a half (consider the recent questions about the 1973 expedition in the Andes and its lingering mysteries). Meanwhile, learning about how cosmic rays were “hunted” in the early 20th century introduced me to a host of investigators who did all kinds of experiments before the more famous men like Hess and Millikan and Compton. These investigators were fascinating people and the notion of all of them doing all kinds of dogged work in backyards and tunnels, and via the occasional balloon, to better understand something that was only the wisp of an idea, is the stuff of scientific dreams.

And then there’s Allen Carpé taking measurements in his investigations at over 11,000 feet on the Muldrow Glacier hoping he will get some answers for Compton. (And he did although Compton never publicly credited him for his work.)

Aviation + Mountaineering + Science = an unexpected dive into the nature of investigation. As someone who has spent years tracking aviation accident investigations, I was delighted by how all this played out. Investigators (any kind) are just really cool folks to learn about.

And, it started with Joe Crosson! Now you know yet another reason why I think he’s awesome.

Joe with this sister Marvel.

Next week an aviation accident investigation. And if you enjoyed reading, please spread the word on Probable Cause.

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