ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on few subjects in modern physics, which is more nonsense written than on cosmic rays. To begin with, they are not rays in the ordinary sense of that word. Three different instruments have been used to detect them. The Geiger-Mller counter, designed for work on radioactivity, is an electrically charged wire in the centre of a metal cylinder in a glass tube which discharges whenever a particle passing through the tube makes the air conduct electricity, or in technical language, ionizes it. The world's most powerful permanent magnet used to be in Blackett's laboratory at Birckbeck College, London. Now the most powerful ones are on Mount Alaghez in Armenia, where Alikhanyan and Alikhanov are working. Both are Armenians, and they are brothers, but one of them put a Russian ending to his name to avoid confusion. When cloud chamber photographs were examined, the surprising result emerged that the 'rays' consisted of several quite different kinds of particles.
