Student of the Cosmos

'I hope to improve my intuition."

This summary of his hopes for a new study of cosmic radiation by Prof. Forrest Boley of the Physics Department may sound like a modest goal to some. To others it may seem downright unscientific. Isn't the intuitive, catch-as-catchcan approach the very antithesis of the careful, scientific method?

Not entirely, in Professor Boley's view. The careful collecting and analyzing of data is vitally important, of course. But once you have a collection of seemingly unrelated facts, what do you do? Or how do you determine which facts to collect and analyze?

This is where the speculative, the intuitive insight, the "seat of the pants" becomes important. Suppose you were speculating about the origins of cosmic rays, those high-energy protons and atomic nuclei that bombard the earth's atmosphere. You know that sun, stars and nebuli are composed of plasma, an ionized gas in which the electrons are stripped from the nuclei. The plasma is much like the particles that cause cosmic radiation before they enter the earth's atmosphere. You also know that wave motion has been observed in plasmas when a beam of atomic particles is passed through it. In one case the beam causes the waves; in another the waves seem to accelerate the particles. How does this acceleration really occur?

You are still speculating. You have seen "surfers" in the ocean riding the front of a wave. They are picked up by the wave and hurtled to the beach. Could the high-energy protons in cosmic radiation be "surfers" that had been caught up in the plasma wave action, accelerated and hurtled into space to enter the earth's atmosphere?

This "surfing" thought did occur to Professor Boley. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research thought well enough of a proposal he submitted to test this theory that it awarded him a $120,628 grant for a two-year study of Hydromagnetic Wave-Particle Beam Interaction.

He proposes to simulate these phenomena by constructing a small (one- by three-foot) cylindrical ionizing chamber. He will create the plasma by discharging a high-energy capacitor (10,000 amperes at 5,000 volts) into the gas, thus stripping the atoms of electrons. The waves will be induced by a pulsating current passed through a loop encircling the cylinder. The current will be "the rock thrown in the pond to create waves."

He will then beam various atomic particles at various speeds through the plasma and observe the effects.

And who is Prof. Forrest Boley? Few alumni know because he came to Hanover only last fall. He is teaching and doing research in the Physics Department, and helping to plan the new doctoral program in physics.

He came to Dartmouth from the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory where he had spent the previous three years. Before that he had been chairman of the Physics Department at Wesleyan University and had spent a year in plasma-physics research at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

As indicated by his current project and his bibliography of 30 articles published in various journals, his principal research interests are cosmic radiation, plasma dynamics, and related phenomena.

And as indicated by his vivid "surfing" analogy, his principal teaching interest is infecting young men with his contagious enthusiasm for physical phenomena — both cosmic and subatomic.

He teaches an introductory course in astronomy, Elementary Stellar Physics, a sophomore course in Structure of Matter, and graduate courses in Mechanics and inAstrophysics.

His effectiveness as a teacher is attested by his being chosen by the American Association of Physics Teachers as one of their visiting lecturers this year. He has already visited Bates College and Florida Atlantic University to lecture, hold informal meetings with students, and assist faculty members with curriculum and research problems.

There's a curious "surfing" angle to Professor Boley's life too. In his undergraduate days at lowa State University he did not find physics interesting. But he became curious about astronomical phenomena and found that their study begins with physics. He found that his curiosity caught him up in the wave motion and hurled him into the study of the cosmos of the atom as well as the cosmos of the cosmos.

Prof. Forrest Boley