Great Old TV Episodes...from the Bell Science Series

 

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE COSMIC RAYS is one of the eight hour-long episodes in the Bell Science series of television specials spaced out over the late 1950s and 1960s...later they were all transferred to film and projected on the walls of elementary schools across the nation, including mine, Nova Elementary.  I saw all of them in the fourth through sixth grades (1965-68) and thought so much of them that I would even skip my own class to sneak in on a showing down the hall in another.  Frank Capra directed the first four episodes, including this one from 1957, featuring (pictured) narrator Dr. Frank Baxter (a fixture for all of them) and actor/screenwriter Richard Carlson as they try to win the detective mystery award for the latter part of the twentieth century (with puppets of Dickens, Poe and Dostoevsky serving as judges).  Their story is that of the mysterious cosmic rays that blanket the Earth and how electrons are ripped away from atoms in the process.  By creating an animated analogy using Fagin, Dickens' thief from his Oliver Twist novel, they explain that it's the atoms broken up by the invading rays...i.e. Fagin's "henchmen" that register on all the devices and these subatomic particles are many in number, including protons, neutrons, electrons, positron, mu mesons, and pi mesons...the latter of which Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa in 1935 predicted as an instrumental factor in the yet-unexplained nuclear force.  But what was Fagin, the original cosmic ray?  Naked atoms of all types, stripped of their electrons after being emitted by stars and accelerated to near-light speeds by nebulae across the cosmos...oops, I gave it away.  But of course, it's science and not fiction...

Unlike the other seven Bell Science shows, The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays was difficult at the time for me to follow...I'm guessing that other kids had the same problem: physics is hard enough without throwing nineteenth-century English literature into the mix: it probably didn't help that the first time I saw it was halfway through the film, after I slipped into the back of the room unnoticed.  I was mystified by it all and impressed by how Baxter and Carlson presented the scientists making the important discoveries in such a favorable light...I imagine a lot of young students back then were inspired to go into science and engineering from watching this and other Bell Science movies.  They have all these movies on YouTube...I recently saw this particular episode and noted the discontinuity between the heavy science being taught and the use of puppetry and funny cartoons to explain it.  I was in my first year of life when this show first aired on TV and viewed it some ten years later in school...the science since has dated and even Yakuwa's theory about the nuclear force has been challenged.  But of course now we have quarks, hadrons, and string theory to use as models and frameworks.  Maybe some of today's dry scientific papers with all that mathematics could use some puppets and cartoons, too...and bring back good ol' Dr. Baxter or a reasonable facsimile thereof to help us poor goofs to understand it all better...