Usually the ideas came inside an envelope, printed in a formidable journal—Annalen der Physik from Germany, for instance, or Physical Review from New York—transported by the mail trains to New England, the Midwest, or the West Coast, where the package would be eagerly received by young physicists at places like Harvard, Chicago, or Caltech. The ideas also came to willing readers, in clear and eloquent English, via a publication named the Bell System Technical Journal, where a physicist named Karl Darrow, another former student of Millikan’s, had a gift for summarizing what he called
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