The Ionosphere

SOME YEARS AGO there was a flood of books bearing such titles as “The Doctor Looks at Love”, “The Lawyer Looks at the Law”, “The Poet Looks at Civilization”, etc., etc. I might have followed their precedent by naming this lecture “The Physicist Looks at the Ionosphere”. Better would have been to say “The Physicist Listens to the Ionosphere” for while the actual procedure is neither listening nor looking in the usual senses, it is rather more like listening. As a matter of fact we have all of us listened to the ionosphere — all of us excepting those who as yet have never hearkened to a broadcast from long distance, and who must by now be few. Any program which is heard from more than a few hundred miles, and does not come by wire, comes by courtesy of the ionosphere. When we are lending ear to such a program, we are listening both to the loud-speaker and to the ionosphere, since both take part in the transmission. Of course we are likely to be listening also to the news; but nowadays the news is generally dismal or frightful or both; and it should be happiness to be diverted for a while from what the ionosphere brings to the qualities of this innocent agent itself, which is not in the least to blame for the evil which it reflects.