Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION on the surface. Change the same amount of lead into bullets and fire them at the screen and they will penetrate. Thus I see the following sequence of events taking place. Light matter is pro- jected from the stars into space at the speed of 186,000 miles a second. During its tremendous journey through space it loses momentum, just enough at first to cause the red shift when the light is observed. At a certain interval of time and distance after this it has lost so much momentum that it ceases to have the properties of light; the pho- tons have coalesced into the bigger, more penetrating elec- trons, which we call cosmic rays. Even with the loss of a few thousand miles a second they still have a tremendous speed for such particles. Note that the calculated speed: of cosmic rays is just below light speed. Cosmic rays are known to arrive at the Earth’s surface from all directions in equal density. Only one thing has been observed in all direc- tions—stars. Therefore, from this reasoning these particles must originate from stars. Yet there is no discernible increase of them from our own sun, which is, compara- 114 tively speaking, next door to us compared to even the nearest star. Nor has any increase been observed from the more crowded parts of the home galaxy. It seems then that the course must be the great outside, the far distant nebulz, perhaps those out of range of our telescopes. It could, perhaps, be said that the other galaxies are in some way different from our own— tending by their composition to the formation of cosmic rays. This seems, on the basis — of common sense, most un- likely; also it is not en- couraged by the known characteristics of the further nebule, which, as far as can be ascertained, are similar in all respects to our own. There you have the theme of the theory. It could be enlarged upon and altered to some extent. To work out the mathematics of the effect of light upon light would be an interesting task. It is a theory which seems to fit; which doesn’t necessarily make it the truth, but to me the Expand- ing Universe theory was based on incomplete data, and has outlived its usefulness, and should be dumped before it entangles and hamstrings bet- ter and more enlightening theories. comiclooks.conn