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PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
L Langmuir
(Colloquium at The Knolls Research Laboratory, December 18, 1953)
Transcribed and edited by R. N. Hall
PREFACE
On December 18, 1953, Dr. Irving Langmuir
gave a colloquium at the Research Laboratory that
will long be remembered by those in his audience.
The talk was concerned with what Langmuir called
"the science of things that aren't so," and in it he gave
: a colorful account of several examples of a particular
kind of pitfall into which scientists may sometimes
stumble.
Langmuir never published his investigations into
the subject of Pathological Science, ' A tape recording
was made of his speech, but this has been lost or
.erased. Recently, however, a microgroove disk tran-
scription that was made from this tape was found
among the Langmuir papers in the Library of Congress.
This disk recording is of poor quality, but most of
what he said can be understood with a little practice,
and it constitutes the text of this report.
A small amount of editing was felt to be desir-
ble. Some abortive or repetitious sentences were
·eliminated. Figures from corresponding publications
were used to represent his blackboard sketches, and
some references were added for the benefit of anyone
. wishing to undertake a further investigation of this
subject. The disk recording has been transcribed
· back onto tape, and a copy is on file in the Whitney
.Library.
Gratitude is hereby expressed to the staff of the
·Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for
their cooperation in lending us the disk recording so
we could obtain the best possible copy of the Langmuir
speech, and for providing access to other related
Langmuir papers.
COLLOQUIUM ON PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE,
by Irving Langmuir
This is recorded by Irving Langmuir
on March 8. 1954. It is transcribed from
a tape recording, section number.three, of
the lecture on "Pathological Science" that I
gave on December 18, 1953.
Contents:
Page
1
5
6
Page
Characteristic Symptoms of
Pathological Science
7
Allison Effect
8
Extrasensory Perception
9
11
Flying Saucers
Question Period
Epilogue
11
References
13
Davis-Barnes Effect
The thing started in this way .. On April the 23rd,
1929, Professor Bergen Davis from Columbia Uni-
versity came up and gave a colloquium in this Lab- .
oratory, in the old building, and it was very inter-
esting. He told Dr. Whitney, and myself, and a few
others something about what he was going to talk .
about beforehand and he was very enthusiastic about
it and he got us interested in it, and well. I'll show
you right on this diagram what kind of thing happened
(Fig. 1).
U
1
.
Detail of filament and grid
R
Fig. 1 Diagram of first experimental tube. S, radio-
active source; W, thin glass window; F. filament;
G, grid; R. lead to silvered surface; A. second
anode; M, magnetic field; C, copper seals; Y. and
Z, zinc sulfide screens.
He produced a beam of alpha rays from polonium
in a vacuum tube. He had a parabolic hot cathode
electron emitter with a hole in the middle, and the
alpha rays came through it and could be counted by
scintillations on a zinc sulfide screen with a micro-
scope over here (Y and Z). The electrons were fo-
cused on this plate, so that for a distance there was
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Davis-Barnes Effect
N-Rays
Mitogenetic Rays
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a stream of electrons moving along with the alpha
particles. Now you could accelerate the electrons
and get them up to the velocity of the alpha particles.
To get an electron to move with that velocity takes
about 590 volts; so if you put 590 volts here, accel-
erating the electrons, the electrons would travel along
with the alpha particles and the idea of the experiment
was that if they moved along together at the same ve-
· locity they might recombine so that the alpha particle
would lose one of ita charges, would pick up an elec-
tron, so that instead of being a helium atom with two
positive charges it would only have one charge. Well,
if an alpha particle with a double charge had one elec-
tron, it's like the Bohr theory of the hydrogen atom,
and you know its energy levels. It's just like a hy-
drogen atom, with a Balmer series, and you can cal-
culate the energy necessary to knock off this electron
and so on
Well, what they found, Davis and Barnes, Was
that if this velocity was made to be the same as that
of the alpha particle there was a loss in the number
of deflected particles. If there were no electrons.
for example, and no magnetic field, all the alpha par-
ticles would be collected over here (Y) and they had
'something of the order of 50 per minute which they
.
counted over here. Now if you put on a magnetic
field you could deflect the alpha particles so they go
down here (Z). But if they picked up an electron then
they would only have half the charge and therefore
they would only be deflected half as'much and they
' would not strike the screen,
. .
.
Now the results that they got, or said they got at
that time, were very extraordinary. They found that
not only did these electrons combine with the alpha
particles when the electron velocity was 590 volts,
but also at a series of discrete differences of voltage.
When the velocity of the electrons was less or more
than that velocity by perfectly discrete amounts, then
they could also combine. All the results seemed to
show that about 80% of them combined. In other words,
there was about an 80% change in the current when the
conditions were right. Then they found that the ve-
locity differences had to be exactly the velocities that
you can calculate from the Bohr theory. In other
words, if the electron coming along here happened to
be going with a velocity equal to the velocity that it
would have if it was in a Bohr orbit, then it will be
captured.
-
Of course, that makes a difficulty right away be-
cause in the Bohr theory when there is an electron
coming in from infinity it has to give up half its en-
ergy to settle into the Bohr orbit. Since it must con-
serve energy, it has to radiate out, and it radiates
out an amount equal to the energy that it has left in
the orbit. So, if the electron comes in with an amount
of energy equal to the amount you are going to end up
with, then you have to radiate an amount of energy
equal to twice that, which nobody had any evidence
for. So there was a little difficulty which never was
quite resolved although there were two or three people
including some in Germany who worked up theories to
account for how that might be. Sommerfeld, for ex-
ample, in Germany. He worked up a theory to account
for how the electron could be captured if it had a ve-
locity equal to what it was going to have after it set-
tled down into the orbit.
Well, there were these discrete peaks, each one
corresponding to one of the energy levels in the Bohr
theory of the helium atom, and nothing else. Those
were the only thinga they recorded, So you had these
discrete peaks. Well, how wide were they? Well,
they were one hundredth of a volt wide. In other words,
you had to have 590 volts .. That would give you equal
velocities but there were other peaks, and I think the
next velocity would be about 325. 1 volts. If you had
that voltage, then you got beautiful capture. If you
didn't, if you changed it by one hundredth of a volt --
nothing. It would go right from 80% down to nothing.
It was sharp. They were only able to measure to a
hundredth of a volt so it was an all-or-none effect.
Well, besides this peak at this point, there were ten
or twelve different lines in the Balmer series, all of
which could be detected, and all of which had an 80%
efficiency. (See Fig. 2. ) They'almost completely
captured all the electrons when you got exactly on the
peak.
Porcent of capturs
400
416
4 : 599
Volks
Fig. 2 Electron capture as a function of accelerating
voltage. [Copy from Barnes, Phys. Rev. , 35, 217
(1930). ]
Well, in the discussion, we questioned how. ex-
perimentally, you could examine the whole spectrum;
because each count, you see, takes a long time.
There was a long series of alpha particle counts, that
took two minutes at a time, and you had to do it ten
or fifteen times and you had to adjust the voltage to a
hundredth of a volt. If you have to go through steps
of a hundredth of a volt each and to cover all the range
from 330 up to 900 volts, you'd have quite a job.
(Laughter) Well, they said that they didn't do it quite
that way. They had found by some preliminary work
that they did check with the Bohr orbit velocities so
they knew where to look for them. They found them
sometimes not exactly where they expected them but
they explored around in that neighborhood and the re-
sult was that they got them with extraordinary pre-
cision So high, in fact, that they were sure they'd
be able to check the Rydberg constant more accurately
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than it can be done by studying the hydrogen spectrum,
which is something like one in 10'. At any rate, they
had no inhibitions at all as to the accuracy which could
be obtained by this method especially since they were
measuring these voltages within a hundredth of a volt.
Anybody who looks at the setup would be a little
doubtful about whether the electrons had velocities that
were fixed and definite within 1/100 of a volt because
this is not exactly a homogeneous field. The distance
was only about 5 mm in which they were moving along
together.
Well, in his talk, a few other things came out
that were very interesting. One was that the percent-
.age of capture was always around' 80%. The curves
would come along like this as a function of voltage
(Fig. 2). The curve would come along at about 80%
and there would be a sharp peak up here and another
sharp peak here and, well, all the peaks were about
the same height.
Well, we asked, how did this depend upon current
density? "That's very interesting," he said, "It
doesn't depend at all upon current density."
We asked, "How much could you change the tem-
perature of the cathode here?"
"Well, " he said, "that's the queer thing about it.
You can change it all the way down to room temper-
ature. " (Laughter)
"Well, " I said, "then you wouldn't have any elec-
trons."
"Oh, yes," he said, "if you check the Richardson
equation and calculate, you'll find that you get elec-
. trons even at room temperature and those are the ones
that are captured."
"Well," I said, "there wouldn't be enough to com-
bine with all the alpha particles and, besides that, the
alpha particles are only there for a short time as they
pass through and the electrons are a long way apart
at such low current densities, at 10 " amperes or so. "
(Laughter)
He said, "That seemed like quite a great diffi-
culty. But," he said, "you see it isn't so bad be-
cause we now know that the electrons are waves. So
the electron doesn't have to be there at all in order to
combine with something. Only the waves have to be
there and they can be of low intensity and the quantum
'theory causes all the electrons to pile in at just the
right place where they are needed. ", So he saw no
difficulty. And so it went.
Well, Dr. Whitney likes the experimental method;
and these were experiments, very careful experi-
ments, described in great detail, and the results
seemed to be very interesting from a theoretical point
of view. . So Dr. Whitney suggested that he would like
to see thene experiments repeated with a geiger
counter instead of counting scintillations, and C. W.
Hewlett, who was here working on geiger counters,
had a setup and it was proposed that we would give
him one of these, maybe at a cost of several thousand
dollars or so for the whole equipment, so that he
could get better data. But I was a little more cautious.
I said to Dr. Whitney that before we actually give it
to him and just turn it over to him. it would be well
to go down and take a look at these experiments and
see what they really mean. Well, Hewlett was very
much interested and I was interested ao only about
two days later, after this colloquium, we went down
to New York. We went to Davia's Laboratory at
Columbia University, and we found that they were
very glad to see us, very proud to show us all their
results, so we started in early in the morning.
We sat in the dark room for half an hour to get
our eyes adapted to the darkness so that we could
count scintillations. I said, first I would like to see
these scintillations with the field on and with the field
off. So I looked in and I counted about 50 or 60.
Hewlett counted 70, and I counted somewhat lower.
On the other hand, we both agreed substantially .. What
we found was this. These scintillations were quite
bright with your eyes adapted, and there was no
trouble at all about counting them, when these alpha
particles struck the screen. They came along at a
rate of about 1 per second. When you put on a mag-
netic field and deflected them out, the count came
down to about 17, which was a pretty high percentage,
about 25% background, Barnes was sitting with us,
and he said that's probably radioactive contamination
of the screen. Then, Barnes counted and he got 230
on the first count and about 200 on the next, and when
he put on the field it went down to about 25. Well,
- Hewlett and I didn't know what that mean but we .
couldn't see 230. Later, we understood the reason,
. :
I had seen, and we discussed a little at that
point, that the eyepiece was such that as you looked
through, you got some flashes of light which I took to
be flashes that were just outside the field of view that
would give a diffuse glow that would be perceptible,
And you could count them as eventa, They clearly
were not particles that struck the screen where you
saw it, but nevertheless, they seemed to give a dif-
fuse glow and they came at discrete intervals and you
could count those if you wanted, Well, Hewlett counted
those too and I didn't. That accounted for some dif-
ference. Well, we didn't bother to check into this,
and we went on.
Well. I don't want to spend too much time on this
experiment. I have a 22-page letter that I wrote
about these things and I have a lot of notes. The gist
of it was this. There was a long table at which Barnes
was sitting, and he had another table over here where
he had an assistant of his named Hull who sat here
Jooking at a big scale voltmeter, or potentiometer
really, but it had a scale that went from one to a'
thousand volts and on that scale that went from one
to a thousand, he read hundredths of a volt. (Laughter)
He thought he might be able to do a little better than
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that. At any rate, you could interpolate and put down
figures, you know. Now the room was dark except
for a little light here on which you could read the
scale on that meter. And it was dark except for the
dial of a clock and he counted seintillations for two
'minutes.
'He said he always counted for two minutes.
Actually. I had a stop watch and I checked him up.
They sometimes were as low as one minute and ten
seconds and sometimes one minute and fifty-five
seconds but he counted them all as two minutes, and
:, yet the results were of high accuracy!
Well, we made various suggestions, One was to
turn off the voltage entirely. Well, then Barnes got
some low values around 20 or 30, or sometimes as
high as 50. Then to get the conditions on a peak he
adjusted the voltage to two hundred and -- , well
some of those readings are interesting; 325. 01.
That's the figure I put down, and there he got only a
reading of 52, whereas before when he was on the
peak, he got about 230. He didn't like that very much
so he tried changing this to . 02; a change of one hun-
dredth of a volt And there he got 48. Then he went
in between. (Laughter) They fell off, you see, 80
he tried 325. 015 and then he got 107. So that was a
peak,
Well, a little later, I whispered to Hull who was
over here adjusting the voltage, holding it constant,
I suggested to him to make it one tenth of a volt dif-
ferent. Barnen didn't know this and he got 96. Well.
When I suggested this change to Hull, you could see
immediately that he was amazed. He said, "Why;
that's too big a change. That will put it way off the
peak." That was almost one tenth of a volt, you see.
Later I suggested taking a whole volt. (Laughter)
Then we had lunch. We sat for half an hour in
the dark room so as not to spoil our eyes and then we
had some readings at zero volts and then we went
back to 325. 03. We changed by one hundredth of a
volt and there he got 110. And now he got two or
three readings at 110.
.
..
And then I played a dirty trick. I wrote out on a
card of paper 10 different sequences of V and 0. I
meant to put on a certain voltage and then take it off
again. Later I realized that that wasn't quite right
'because when Hull took off the voltage, he sat back
in his chair -- there was nothing to regulate at zero,
so he didn't. Well, of course, Barnes saw him when-
ever he sat back in his chair. Although, the light
wasn't very bright, he could see whether he was
sitting back in his crafr or not so he knew the voltage
wasn't on and the result was that he got a correspond-
.. ing result. So later " whispered, "Don't let him know
. that you're not readi. s," and I asked him to change
the voltage from 325 down to 320 ao he'd have some.
thing to regulate and I said, "Regulate it just as care-
fully as if you were sitting on a peak." So he played
the past from that .me on, and from that time on
Barnes' readinga bid nothing whatever to do with the
voltages that were applied. Whether the voltage was
at one value or another didn't make the slightest dif-
ference. After that he took twelve readings, of which
about half of them were right and the other half were
wrong, which was about what you would expect out of
two sets of values.
I said, "You're through You're not measuring
anything at all You never have measured anything
at All "
"Well," he said, "the tube was gassy. (Laughter)
The temperature has changed and therefore the nickel
plates must have deformed themselves so that the
electrodes are no longer lined up properly."
"Well," I said, "isn't this the tube in which Davis -
said he got the same results when the filament was
turned off completely?"
"Oh, yes," he said, "but we always made blanks
to check ourselves, with and without the voltage on "
He immediately -- without giving any thought to
it -- he immediately had an excuse. He had a reason
for not paying any attention to any wrong results. It
just was built into him. He just had worked that way
all along and always would. There is no question but
what he is honest; he believed these things, absolutely.
Hewlett stayed there and continued to work with
him for quite a while and I went in and talked it over
with Davis and he was simply dumbfounded, 'He
couldn't believe a word of it. He said, "It absolutely
can't be, " he said. "Look at the way we found those
peaks before we knew anything about the Bohr theory.
We took those values and calculated them up and they
checked exactly. Later on, after we got confirmation,
in order to save time, to see whether the peaks were
there we would calculate ahead of time." He was so
sure from the whole history of the thing that it was
utterly impossible that there never had been any
measurements at all that he just wouldn't believe it.
Well. he had just read a paper before the Re-
search Laboratory at Schenectady, and he was going
to read the paper the following Saturday before the
National Academy of Sciences; which he did, and gave
the whole paper. And he wrote me that he was going
to do so on the 24th, I wrote to him on the day after
I got back. Our letters crossed in the mails and'he
said that he had been thinking over the various things
that I had told him, and his confidence wasn't shaken,
so he went ahead and presented the paper before the
National Academy of Sciences.
Then I wrote him a 22-page letter giving all our
data and showing really that the whole approach to
the thing was wrong; that he was counting halluci-
nations, which I find is common among people who
work with scintillations if they count for too long.
Barnes counted for aiz hours a day and it never fa-
tigued him. Of course it didn't fatigue him, because
it was all made up out of his head. (Laughter) He
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told us that you mustn't count the bright particles.
He had a beautiful reason for why you mustn't pay any
attention to the bright flashes. When Hewlett tried
to check his data he said, "Why, you must be counting
those bright flashes. Those things are only due.to
radioactive contamination or something else." He
had a reason for rejecting the very essence of the
thing that was important. So I wrote all this down in
this letter and I got no response, no encouragement,
For a long time Davis wouldn't have anything to do
with it. He went to Europe for a six months leave of
. absence, came back later, and I took up the matter
with him again (1)
In the meantime, I sent a copy of the letter that
I had written to Davis to Bohr asking him to hold it
confidential but to pass it on to various people who
would be trying to repeat these experiments, To
Professor Sommerfeld and other people and it headed
off a lot of experimental work that would have gone
on. And from that time on, nobody ever made another
experiment except one man in England who didn't
know about the letter that I had written to Bohr. (2)
And he was not able to confirm any of it. Well, a
year and a half later, in 1931, there was just a short
little article in the Physical Review in which they say
that they haven't been able to reproduce the effect. (3)
"The results reported in the earlier paper depended
upon observations made by counting scintillations
visually. The scintillations produced by alpha par-
ticles on a zinc sulfide screen are a threshold phe-
nomenon. It is possible that the number of counts
may be influenced by external suggestion or auto-
suggestion to the observer," and later in that paper
they said that they had not been able to check any of
the older data. And they didn't even say that the tube
was gassy. (Laughter)
To me, the thing is extremely interesting, that
men; perfectly honest, enthusiastic over their work,
can so completely fool themselves. Now what was
it about that work that made it so easy for them to
do that? Well, I began thinking of other things. I
had seen R. W. Wood and told him about this phenom-
enon because he's a good experimenter and doesn't
make such mistakes himself very often, if at all.
. And he told me about the N-rays that he had an ex-
perience with back in 1904 So I looked up the data
on the N-rays. (4, 5)
N.rays
.
. . In 1903. Blondlot, who was a well-thought-of
French scientist, member of the Academy of Sciences.
was experimenting with x-rays as almost everybody
was in those days. The effect that he observed was
something of this sort. I won't give. the whole of it.
I'll just give a few outstanding points. He found that
if you have a hot wire, a platinum. wire, or a Nernst
filament or anything that's heated very hot inside an
iron tube and you have a window cut in it and you
have a piece of aluminum about 1/8 of an inch thick
on it, 'that some rays come out through that aluminum
window. ' Oh, it can be as much as two or three inches
thick and go through aluminum, these rays can, but
not through iron. The rays that come out of this
little window fall on a faintly illuminated object, so
that you can just barely see it. You must sit in a dark
room for a long time and he used a calcium sulfide
screen which can be illuminated with light and gave
out a very faint glow which could be seen in a dark
room. Or he used a source of light from a lamp
shining through a pinhole and maybe through another
pinhole so as to get a faint light on a white surface
that was just barely visible.
Now he found that if you turn this lamp. on so that
these rays that come out of this little aluminum slis
would fall on this piece of paper that you are looking
at, you could see it much better. Oh, much better,
and therefore you could tell whether the rays would
go through or not. He said later that a great deal of
skill is needed, He said you mustn't ever look at
the source. You don't look directly at it. He said
that would tire your eyes. Look away from it, and
he said pretty soon you'll see it, or you don't see it,
depending on whether the N-rays are shining on this
piece of paper. In that way, you can detect whether
or not the N-rays are acting.
Well, he found that N-rays could be stored up in
things. For example, you could take a brick. .. He
found that N-rays would go through black. paper and
would go through aluminum. So he took some black
paper and wrapped a brick up in it and put it out in
the street and let the sun shine through the black
paper into the brick and then he found that the brick
world store N-rays and give off the N-rays even with
the black paper on it. He would bring it into the lab-
oratory and you then hold that near the piece of paper
"that you're looking at, faintly Illuminated, and you
can see it much more accurately. Much better, if the
N-rays are there, but not if it's too far away. Then,
he would have very faint strips of phosphorescent
paint and would let a beam of N-rays from two slits
come over and he would find exactly where this thing
intensified its beam.
Well, you'd think he'd make such experiments
as this. To see if with ten bricks you got a stronger
effect than you did with one. No, not at all. . He
didn't get any stronger effect. It didn't do any good
to increase the intensity of the light. You had to de-
pend upon whether you could see it or whether you
couldn't see it. And there, the N-rays were very
important,
Now, a little later, he found that many kinds of
things gave off N-raye. A human being gave off N-rays,
for example. If someone else came into the room,
then you probably could see it. He also found that if
someone made a loud noise that would spoil the effect.
You had to be silent. Heat, however, increased the
effect, radiant heat, Yet that wasn't N-roys itself.
N-rays were not heat because heat wouldn't go through
aluminum. Now he found a very interesting thing
about it was that if you take the brick that's giving
off N-rays and hold it close to your head it goes
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through your skull and it allows you to see the paper
better. Or you can hold the brick near the paper.
that's all right too.
Now he found that there were some other things
that were like negative N-rays. He called them N'-
rays, The effect of the N'-rays is to decrease the
visibility of a faintly illuminated alit, That works
too, but only if the angle of incidence is right, L'
you look at it tangentially you find that the thing in-
creases the intensity when you look at it from this
point of view. It decreases if you look at it normally
"and it increases if you look at it tangentially. All of
which is very interesting. And he published many
papers on it. One right after the other and other
people did too, confirming Blondlot's results. And
.. there were lots of papera published and at one time
about half of them that were confirming the results
of Blondlot. You see, N-rays ought to be important
because x-rays were known to be important and
alpha rays were, and N-rays were somewhere in be-
tweeen ao N-rays must be very important. (Laughter)
Well. R. W. Wood heard about these experi-
ments -- everybody did more or less. So R. W. Wood
went over there and at that time Blondlot had a prism,
quite a large priem of aluminum, with a 60' angle
and he had a Nernst filament with a little alit about
2 mm wide. There were two slita, 2 mm wide each.
This beam fell on the prism and was refracted and he
measured the refractive index to three significant
figures. He found that it wasn't monochromatic,
that there were several different components to the
N-rays and he found different refractive indices for
each of these components. He could measure three
For four different refractive indices each to two or
three significant figures, and he was repeating some
of these and showing how accurately they were re-
.peatable, showing it to R. W. Wood in this dark room.
i
Well, after this had gone on for quite a while,
", and Wood found that he was checking these results
very accurately, measuring the position of the little
piece of paper within a tenth of a millimeter although.
the slits were 2 mm wide, and Wood asked him about
that. He said, "How? How could you, from just the
optics of the thing, with slits two millimeters wide,
. . . how do you get a beam so fine that you can detect its
position within a tenth of a millimeter?"
Blondlot said, "That's one of the fascinating
things about the N-rays. They don't follow the or-
dinary laws of science that you ordinarily think of."
He said, "You have to consider these things all by
themselves. They are very interesting, but you have
· to discover the laws that govern them."
1
Well, in the meantime, the room being very
dark. Wood asked him to repent some of these mea-
surements which he was only too glad to do. But in
the meantime, R. W. Wood put the priem in his
pocket and the results checked perfectly with what he
. . had before. (Laughter) Well, Wood rather cruelly
published that. (6, 7) And that was the end of Blondlot.
Nobody accounts for by what methoda he could
reproduce those results to a tenth of a millimeter.
Wood said that he seemed to be able to do it but no-
body understands that. Nobody understands lots of
things. But some of the Germans came out later --
Pringsheim was one of them -- came out with an ex-
tremely interesting story. They had tried to repeat
some of Blondlot's experimenta and had found this. .
One of the experiments was to have a very faint source
of light on a screen of paper and to make sure that
you are seeing the screen of paper you hold your hand
up like this and move it back and forth. And if you
can see your hand move back and forth then you know
it is illuminated. One of the experiments that Blondlot
made was that the experiment was made much better
if you had some N-rays falling on the piece of paper.
Pringsheim was repeating these in Germany and he
found that if you didn't know where the paper was,
whether it was here or here (in front or behind your
hand), it worked just as well. That is, you could see
your hand just as well if you held it back of the paper
as if you held it in front of it. Which is the natural
thing. because this is a threshold phenomenon And
a threshold phenomenon means that you don't know,
you really don't know, whether you are seeing it or
not. But if you have your hand there, well, of course.
you see your hand because you know your hand's there,
and that's just enough to win you over to where you
know that you see it. But you know it just se well if
the paper happens to be in front of your hand instead
of in back of your hand, because you don't know where
the paper is but you do know where your hand is.
(Laughter)
Mitogenetic Rays
Well, let's go on. About 1923, there was a whole
series of papers by Gurwitsch and others. There were
hundreds of them published on mitogenetic rays. (8)
There are still a few of them being published. I don't
know how many of you have ever heard of mitogenetic
rays. They are rays that are given off by growing
plants. living things, and they were proved, accord-
ing to Gurwitsch, that they were something that would
go through quartz but not through glass. They seemed
to be some sort of ultraviolet light.
The way they studied these was this. You had
some onion roots -- onions growing in the dark or in
the light and the roots will grow straight down Now
if you had another onion root nearby, and this onion
root was growing down through a tube or something,
going straight down, and another onion root came
nearby, this would develop so that there were more
celle on one side than the other. One of the tests
they had made at first was that this root would bend
away. And as it grew this would change in direction
which was evidence that something had traveled from
one onion root to the other. And if you had a piece
of quartz in between it would do it, but if you put
glass in between it wouldn't, So this radiation would .
not go through glass but it would go through quartz.
Well, it started in that way. Then everything
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gave off mitogenetio rays, anything that remotely had
anything to do with living things. And then they started
to use photoelectric cella to check it and whatever
they did they practically always found that if you got
the conditions just right, you could just detect it and
. prove it. But if you looked over those photographic
plates that showed this ultraviolet light you found that
the amount of light was not much bigger than the nat-
ural particles of the photographic plate so that people
could have different opinions as to whether it did or
didn't show this effect and the result was that less
than half of the people who tried to repeat these ex-
periments got any confirmation of it; and so it went.
Well, I'll go on before I get too far along.
Characteristic Symptoms of Pathological Science
The characteristics of this Davis-Barnes exper-
iment and the N-rays and the mitogenetic rays, they
have things in common. These are cases where
there is no dishonesty involved but where people are
tricked into false results by a lack of understanding
about what human beings can do to themselves in the
way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful
thinking or threshold interactions. These are ex-
amples of pathological science. These are things
that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually
hundreds of papers have been published upon them.
Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty
years and then they gradually die away.
Now, the characteristic rules are these (see
Table I):
TABLE I
Symptoms of Pathological Science:
1. The maximum effect that is observed is pro- .
duced by a causative agent of barely detect-
able intensity, and the magnitude of the ef-
fect is substantially independent of the
intensity of the cause,
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains
close to the limit of detectability; or, many
measurements are necessary because of the
very low statistical significance of the results.
3. Claims of great accuracy.
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience.
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought
up on the spur of the moment.
6. Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to
somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually
to oblivion.
The maximum effect that is observed is produced by
a causative agent of barely detectable intensity. For
example, you might think that if one onion root would
affect another due to ultraviolet light, you'd think
that by putting on an ultraviolet source of light you
could get it to work better. Oh no! OH NO! It had to
be just the amount of intensity that's given off by an
onion root. Ten onion roots wouldn't do any better
than one and it doesn't make any difference about
the distance of the source. It doesn't follow any in-
verse square law or anything as simple as that, and
so on. In other words, the effect is independent of
the intensity of the cause. That was true in the
mitogenetic rays, and it was true in the N-rays. Ten
bricks didn't have any more effect than one. It bad
to be of low intensity. We know why it had to be of
low intensity: so that you could fool yourself so
easily. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. Davis-Barnes
worked just as well when the filament was turned off.
They counted scintillations.
Another characteristic thing about them all is
that, these observations are near the threshold of
visibility of the eyes. Any other sense, I suppose,
would work as well. Or many measurements are
necessary, many measurements because of very low
statistical significance of the results. in the mito-
genetic rays particularly it started out by seeing
something that was bent. Later on, they would take
' a hundred onion roots and expose them to something
and they would get the average position of all of them
to see whether the average had been affected a little
. bit by an appreciable amount, Or statistical mea-
surements of a very small effect which by taking
large numbers were thought to be significant. Now
the trouble with that is this. There is a babit with
most people, that when measurements of low signif-
cance are taken they find means of rejecting data.
They are right at the threshold value and there are
many reasons why you can discard data. Davis and
Barnes were doing that right along. L' things were
doubtful at all why they would discard them or not
discard them depending on whether or not they fit
the theory. They didn't know that, but that's the way
it worked out.
There are claims of great accuracy. . Barnes wa
going to get the Rydberg constant more accurately
than the spectroscopists could. Great sensitivity or
great specificity, we'll come across that particulari:
in the Allison effect.
Fantastic theories contrary to experience, In tl
Bohr theory, the whole idea of an electron being cap
tured by an alpha particle when the alpha particles
aren't there just because the waves are there doesn'
make a very sensible theory.
Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up
on the spur of the moment. They always had an
answer -- always.
The ratio of the supporters to the critics rises
up somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to
oblivion The critics can't reproduce the effects.
Only the supporters could do that. In the end, nothis
was salvaged, Why should there be? There isn't
anything there. There never was. That's
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characteristic of the effect. Well, I'll go quickly on
to some of the other things.
.Allison Effect
The Allison effect is one of the most extraor-
dinary of all($) It started in 1927. There were hun-
dreds of papers published in the American Physical
. Society, the Physical Review, the Journal of the
. American Chemical Society -- hundreds of papers.
Why, they discovered five or six different elements
that were listed in the Discoveries of the Year. There
were new elements discovered -- Alabamine, Vir-
.
:.
ginium, a whole series of elements and isotopes were
discovered by Allison
The effect was very simple. There is the
Faraday effect by which a beam of polarized light
passing through a liquid which is in a magnetic field
is rotated -- the plane of polarization is rotated by a
longitudinal magnetic field. Now that idea has been
known for a long time and it has a great deal of im-
portance in connection with light shutters. At any
rate, you can let light through or not depending upon
the magnetic field. Now the experiment of Allison's
. was this (Fig. 3) They had a glass cell and a coil
-
..
.
of wire around it (B1, B2) and you have wires coming
' up here, a Lecher system. Here you have a epark
gap, so a flash of light comes through here and goes
. . through a Nicol prism over here and another one
over here, and you adjust this one with a liquid like
water or carbon disulfide or something like that in
the cell so that there was a steady light over here.
If you have a beam of light and you polarize it and
.
then you turn on a magnetic field, why you see that
you could rotate the plane of polarization There
will be an increase in the brightness of the light when
you put a magnetic field on here. Now they wanted to
find the time delay, how long it takes. So they had a
spark and the same field that produced the spark in-
duced a current through the coil, and by sliding this
wire along the trolley of the Lecher system, they
could cause a compensating delay. The sensivity of
this thing was so great that they could detect differ-
ences of about 3 x 10-10 seconds. By looking in here
High
Potential
Fig. 3 Diagram of apparatus and connections. [Copy
from F. Allison, Phys. Rev., 30, 66 (1927), Fig. 1}
they could see these flashes of light, the light from
the sparks, and they tried to decide as they changed
the position of this trolley whether it got brighter or
dimmer and they set it for a minimum, and measured
the position of the trolley. They put in here -- in this
glass tube -- they put a water solution and added some
salt to it. And they found that the time lag was
changed, so that they got a change in the time lag de-
pending upon the presence of salts.
Now they first found -- very quickly -- that if you
put in a thing like ethyl alcohol that you got one char-
acteristic time lag, and with acetic acid another one,
quite different. But if you had ethyl acetate you got
the sum of the two. You got two peaks. So that you
could analyze ethyl acetate and find the acetic acid
and the ethyl alcohol. Then they began to study salt
solutions and they found that only the metal elements
counted but they didn't act as an ion. That is, all
potassium ions weren't the same, but potassium
nitrate and potassium chloride and potassium sulfate
all had quite characteristic different points, that
were a characteristic of the compound. It was only
the positive ion that counted and yet the negative tons
had a modifying effect. But you couldn't detect the
negative ions directly.
Now they began to see how sensitive it was.
Well, they found that any intensity more than about
10"" molar solution would always produce the max-
imum effect, and you'd think that that would be kind
of discouraging from the analytical point of view, but
no, not at all, And you could make quantitative mea-
surements to about three significant figures by di-
luting the solutions down to a point where the effect
disappeared. Apparently, it disappeared quite sharply
when you got down to about 10-4 or 3. 42 x 10"" in
concentration, or something of that sort and then the
effect would disappear. Otherwise, you would get
it, so that you could detect the limit within this
extraordinary degree of accuracy.
Well, they found that things were entirely dif-
ferent, even in these very dilute solutions, in sodium
nitrate from what it was with sodium chloride.
Nevertheless, it was a characteristic which depended
upon the compound even though the compound was
disassociated into ions at those concentrations.
That didn't make any difference but it was fact that
was experimentally proven. They then went on to
find that the isotopes all stick right out like sore
thumbs with great regularity. In the case of lead,
they found sixteen isotopes. These isotopes were
quite regularly spaced so that you could get 16
different positions and you could assign numbers to
those so that you can identify them and tell which
they are. Unfortunately, you couldn't get the con-
centrations quantitatively. even the dilution method
didn't work quite right because they weren't all
equally sensitive. You could get them relatively but
only approximately. Well, it became important as
a means of detecting elements that hadn't yet been
discovered, like Alabamine and elements that are
now known, and filling out the periodic table. All the
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elements in the periodic table were filled out that way
and published.
But a little later, in 1945 or 46, I was at the
University of California. Owen Latimer who is now
Head of the Chemistry Department there -- not Owen
Latimer, Wendell Latimer -- had had a bet with G. N.
Lewis (in 1932). He said, "There's something funny
about this Allison effect, how they can detect isotopes."
He had known somebody who had been down with
Allison and who had been very much impressed by
the effect and he said to Lewis. "I think I'll go down
and see Allison, to Alabama, and see what there is
in it. I'd like to use some of these methods."
Now people had begun to talk about spectroscopie
evidence that there might be traces of hydrogen of
atomic weight three. It wasn't spoken of as tritium
at that time but hydrogen of atomic weight three that
might exist in small amounts. There was a little
spectroscopie evidence for it and Latimer said, "Well,
this might be a way of finding it. I'd like to be able
to find it " So he went and spent three weeks at
Alabama with Allison and before he went he talked
it over with G. N. Lewis about what he thought the
prospects were and Lewis said, "I'll bet you ten
dollars you'll find that there's nothing in it." And
so they had this bet on. He went down there and he
came back. He set up the apparatus and made it work
.so well that G. N. Lewis paid him the ten dollars.
(Laughter) He then discovered tritium and he pub-
lished an article in the Physical Review. (10) Just a
little short note saying that using Allison's method he
had detected the isotope of hydrogen of atomic weight
three. And he made some sort of estimate as to its
concentration.
.
Well, nothing more was heard about it. I saw
him then, seven or eight years after that. I had
written these things up before, about this Allison
effect, and I told him about this point of view and how
the Allison effect fits all these characteristics. Well,
I know at that time at one of the meetings of the
American Chemical Society there was great discussion
as to whether to accept papers on the Allison effect.
There they decided: No, they would not accept any
more papers on the Allison effect, and I guess the
Physical Review did too. At any rate, the American
Chemical Society decided that they would not accept
.any more manuscripts on the Allison effect. How-
ever, after they had adopted that as a firm policy.
they did accept one more a year or two later because
here was a case where all the people in the faculty
here had chosen twenty or thirty different solutions
that they had made up and they had labeled them all
secretly and they had taken every precaution to make
sure that nobody knew what was in these solutions.
and they had given them to Allison and he bad used
his method on them and he had gotten them all right,
although many of them were at concentrations of
10"! and so on, molar. That was sufficiently defi-
nite -- good experimental methods -- and it was accepted
for publication by the American Chemical Society
but that was the last. (11) You'd think that would be
the beginning, not the end.
Anyway, Latimer said, "You know, I don't know
what was wrong with me at that time," He said,
"After I published that paper I never could repeat the
experiments again. I haven't the least idea why."
"But," he said, "Those results were wonderful, I
showed them to G. N. Lewis and we both agreed that
it was all right. They were clean cut. I checked
myself every way I knew how to. I don't know what
else I could have done, but later on I just couldn't
ever do it again, "
I don't know what it is. That's the kind of thing.
that happens in all of these :. All the people who had
anything to do with these things find that when you get
through with them -- you can't account for Bergen
Davis saying that they didn't calculate those things
from the Bohr theory, that they were found by em-
pirical methods without any idea of the theory. Barnes
made the experimenta brought them in to Davis, and
Davis calculated them up and discovered all of a
sudden that they fit the Bohr theory. He said Barnes
didn't have anything to do with that, Well, take it or
leave it. how did he do it? It's up to you to decide.
I can't account for it. 'All I know is that there was
nothing salvaged at the end, and therefore none of it
was ever right, and Barnes never did see a peak,
You can't have a thing halfway right. .
Extrasensory Perception
Well. there's Rhine. I spent a day with Rhine
at Duke University at the meeting of the American
Chemical Society, probably about 1934. . Rhine had
published a book and I'll just tell you a few things.
First of all, I went in and told Rhine these things.
I told him the whole story. I said these things
(Table I) are the characteristics of those things that
are't so. They are all characteristics of your thing
too. (Laughter) He said, "I wish you'd publish that.
I'd love to have you publish it. That would stir up
an awful lot of interest. " He said, "I'd have more
graduate students. We ought to have more graduate
students. This thing is so important that we should
have more people realize its importance This should
be one of the biggest departments in the university."
Well. I won't tell you the whole story with Rhine,
because I talked with him all day. He uses cards
which you guess at by turning over. You have extra-
sensory perception. You have 25 cards and you deal
them out face down, or one person looks at them, .
and the other person on the other side of the screen
looks at them and you read his mind. The other
thing is for nobody to know what the cards are, in
which case they are turned over without anybody
looking at them. You record them and then you look
them up and see if they check and that's telepathy, or
clairvoyance rather. Telepathy is when you can read
another person's mind.
Now a later form of the thing would be for you to
decide now and write down what the cards are going
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to be when they are shuffled tomorrow. That works
too, (Laughter)
All of these things are nice examples where the
magnitude of the effect is entirely independent of
magnitude of the cause. That is, the experiments
worked just as well where the shuffling ia to be done
tomorrow as when it was done some time ago. It
doesn't make any difference in the results, There is
no appreciable difference between clairvoyance and
telepathy. Although, if you try to think of the mech-
anisms of the two, it should be quite different. In
order to get the cards to telegraph you all the infor-
mation that's in them as to how they are arranged,
' and so on, when they are stacked up on top of each
other and to have it given in the right sequence, it
is rather difficult to think of a mechanism. On the
other band. it is conceivable that there may be some
sort of mechanism in the brain that might send out
some sort of unknown messages that could be picked
up by some other brain. That's a different order of
magnitude. : A different order of difficulty. But they
were all the same from Rhine's point of view.
Well, now, the little things that I have are these.
There are many more I could give you Rhine said
being in quite a philosophical mood, "It's funny how
the mind tries to trick you." He said, "People don't
like these experiments. I've had millions of these
cases where the average is about 7 out of 25." You'd
expect 5 out of 25 to come right by chance and on the
grand average they come out, oh, out of millions, or
hundreds of millions of cases, they average around 7.
Well. to get 7 out of 25 would be a common enough
occurrence but if you take a large number and you
get 7, well you doubt the statistics.or the statistical
application or, above all, what I think of and I want
to give you reasons forthinking, is the rejection of
a small percentage of the data.
·
-
I'll go first, before I get into what Rhine said,
and say thist David Langmuir, a nephew of mine,
who was in the Atomic Energy Commission, when he
was with the Radio Corporation of America a few
years ago, he and a group of other young men thought
they would like to check up Rhine's work so they got
some cards and they spett many evenings together
finding how these cards turned up and they got well
above 5. They began to get quite excited about it and
they kept on, and they kept on, and they were right
on the point of writing Rhine about the thing. And
they kept on a little longer and things began to fall
off, and fall off a little more, and they fell off a
little more. . And after many, many, many days.
they fell down to an average of five -- grand average --
. so they didn't write to Rhine. Now if Rhine bad re- ..
ceived that information, that this reputable body of
men had gone ahead and gotten a value of 8 or 8 or
.10 after so many trials, why he would have put it in.
" .: his book. How much of that sort of thing, when you
Are fed information af that sort by people who are . .
Interested -- how are you going to weigh the things
. ..
that are published ta the book?
Now an illustration of how it works is this. He
told me that, "People don't like me, " he said "I took
a lot of cards and sealed them up in envelopes and I
put a code number on the outside, and I didn't trust
anybody to know that code. Nobody! "
(A section of the speech is missing at this point.
It evidently described some tests that gave scores
below 5. ) " ... the idea of having this thing sealed
up in the cards as though I didn't trust them, and
therefore to spite me they inade it purposely low. "
"Well, " I said, "that's interesting -- interesting
a lot, because you said that you'd published a sum- .
mary of all of the data that you had. . And it comes
out to be 7. It is now within your power to take a
larger percentage including those cards that are
sealed up in those envelopes which could bring the
whole thing back down to five. Would you do that?"
"Of course not," he said. "That would be dis-
honest."
1
"Why would it be dishonest?"
07
"The low scores are just as significant an the
high ones, aren't they? They proved that there's
something there just as much, and therefore it
wouldn't be fair."
I said, "Are you going to count them, are you
going to reverse the sign and count them, or count
them as credite?"
-.
"No, No," he satd.
I said, "What have you done with them? Are they
in your book?"
"No."
"Why, I thought you said that all your values
were in your book, Why haven't you put those in?"
"Well," he said, "I haven't had time to work
them up."
"Well, you know all the results, you told me the
resulta. "
"Well," he said, "I don't give the results out
until I've had time to digest them, "
.
I said, "How many of these things have you?"
He showed me filing cabinets -- a whole row of them.
Maybe hundreds of thousands of cards. He bas a
filing cabinet that contained nothing but these things
that were done in sealed up envelopes. And they were
the ones that gave the average of five.
. Well, we'll let it stand at that, A year or so
later, he published a new volume of his book. In that,
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envelopes and they all come up to around seven And
nothing is said about the fact that for a long time they
came down below five. You see, he knows if they
come below five, he knows that isn't fair to the public
to misrepresent this thing by including those things
that prove just as much a positive result as though
they came above. It's just a trick of the mind that
these people do to try to spite you and of course it
wouldn't be fair to publish. (12)
Flying Saucers
I'm not going to talk about flying saucers very
much except just this. A flying saucer is not exactly
science, although some scientific people have written
things about them. I was a member of General
Schwartz's (?) Advisory Committee after the war,
and we held some very secret meetings in Washington
in which there was a thing called project SIGN. I
think it's s-i-g-n. Anyway, it was hushed up. It
was hardly even talked about and it was the flying
saucer stuff, gathering the evidence, and weighing
and evaluating the data on flying saucers. And he
said, "You know, it's very serious, it really looks
as though there is something there." Well, I told
him afterwards -- I told him this story here. I said
that it seems to me from what I know about flying
saucers they look like this sort of thing. . Well, any-
way, it ended up by two men being brought to Sche-
nectady with a boiled down group of about twenty or
thirty best cases from hundreds and hundreds that
they knew all about. I didn't want them all, I said to
pick out about thirty or forty of the best cases, and
"bring them to Schenectady, and we'll spend a couple
of days going over them, and he did.
Most of them were Venus seen in the evening
through a murky atmosphere. Venus can be seen in
the middle of the day if you know where to look for
it. Almost any clear bright day especially when
Venus is at its brightest, and sometimes it's caused
almost panic, It has caused traffic congestion in New
York City when Venus is seen in the evening near
some of the buildings around Times Square and
people thought it was a comet about to collide with the
earth, or somebody from Mars, or something of that
sort. That was a long time ago. That was thirty or
forty years ago. Venus still causes flying saucers.
,
Well, they only had one photograph or two photo-
graphs taken by one man. It looked to me like a
piece of tar paper when I first saw it and the two
photographs showed the thing in entirely different
shapes. I asked for more details about it. What was
the weather at the time? Well, they didn't know but
they'd look it up, And they got out some papers and
there it was. It w. , taken about fifteen or twenty
minutes after a vic ent thunderstorm out in Ohio.
Well, what's more natural than some piece of tar
peper picked up by a little miniature twister and being
carried a few the isand feet up into the clouds and it
was coming dow", that's all. So what could it be?
"But it was going at an enormous speed. " Of course
the man who saw :: didn't have the vaguest idea of
how far away it was. That's the trouble. If you see
something that's up in the sky, a light or any kind of
an object, you haven't the vaguest idea of how big it
is. You can guess anything you like about the speed.
You ask people how big the moon is. Some say it is
as big as your fist, or as big as a baseball. Some
say as big as a house. Well, how big is it really?
You can't tell by looking at it. How can you tell how
big a flying saucer is? Well, anyway,. after I went
through these things I didn't find a single one that
made any sense at all. There was nothing consistent
about them. They were all things that suffered from
these facts. They were all subjective. They were-
all near s threshold. You don't know what the
threshold is exactly in detecting the velocity of an
object that you see up in the sky, where you don't
know whether it's a thousand feet or ten thousand feet
or a hundred thousand feet up. But they all fitted in
with this general pattern, namely, that there doesn't
seem to be any evidence that there is anything in
them. And, anyway. these men were convinced and
they ended project SIGN. And later the whole thing was de -
classified and the thing was written up by the Saturday
Evening Post about four or five years ago, At any
rate, that seemed to be the end of it. But, of course,
the newspapers wouldn't let a thing like that die.
(Laughter) it keeps coming up again, and again, and
again, and the old story keeps coming back again
It always bas. It's probably hundreds of years old
anyway.
Well, I think that's about all. If there are any
questions, I'd be happy to say more. .
Question Period
(W. C. White):
People may want to go now because it's quarter
after five though I'm aure Dr. Langmuir would be
glad to discuss this some more.
.A.
I was going to add another one to these charac-
teristics. Isn't the desire for publicity another of
the characteristics?
. A.
Well, it is in Rhine's case. There is no question
about that. Rhine, I think, ....
. thinks he's honest.
but I know perfectly well that he -- everything he
says, he talks about the importance of getting
more students, and the importance of having the
people in his own university understand the im-
portance of this thing and so on And then the
fact that no man in his senses could discard data
the way he did those things sealed up in the cards.
So I don't hold a very high value on his work.
Now the other people, I don't have the slightest
doubt but what these men are really honest. They
are sincere. They loved publicity; Allison, of
course, loved to publish about new elements one
after the other. These were published by the
American Chemical Society; and Latimer liked
to publish his little article on tritium, the first
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discovery of tritium. So I think that has some-
thing to do with it, but I don't think that that's
the driving force. I think the driving force is
quite a normal scientific desire to make dis-
coveries and to understand things. Davis and
Barnes were finding things and it was wonderful
while it lasted.
Q. (Liebhatsky); I just wanted to point out that per-
haps the neatest comment on item four was made
at the University of California when this business
was discussed.at the Research Conference there
in about 1930 or 32. Professor Birge said that
this effect was just Allison wonderland. (Laughter)
(Langmuir): Did you ever hear Latimer talk
about it?
(Webhafaky): Well, Latimer was pushing it and
you've got to allow for Latimer's persuasiveness.
There were people on the faculty that I'm sure
never believed it.
(Langmuir): But it was funny that G. N. Lewis
would believe it.'
(Liebhafsky): Well, you know that there is a
very close personal relationship between Latimer
and Lewis.
(Langmuir): I understand that Lewis got back
his ten dollars. (Laughter)
Q. How would an analysis like this apply to religious
experiences?
A. Well, the method of approach to religious
questions -- a lot of people think you don't want
to have any evidence, you want faith; and if that's
your attitude why I don't think this thing applies.
But if some religious performer of a certain
belief tries to argue with me, my reactions
would be very much like this.
Q. In setting up these criteria, you may in a way
limit the possibilities of scientific investigation.
It occurred to me that suppose something happened
.
in the heavens -- some astronomical event -- that
..
nobody had ever seen before. Something that
happens once in a million years. Really, I mean,
supposing that you could tell. It would fit the
same criterion, wouldn't it?
A.
No, I don't want to depend on any one of these.
I've been reading the life of Pasteur. Pasteur
had the idea of germs. Everybody thought that
he was a fool -- thought there couldn't be any
sense to the subject. It took a long time before
germs were believed. People believed in spon-
taneous generation of new forms of life. They
happened spontaneously not by the introduction
of spores from the outside but spontaneously .-
and Pasteur had to fight that .The test of time
is the thing that ultimately checks this thing.
In the end, something is salvaged. You can't
do that while the thing is growing, while the
thing is being discussed, but in the end you do
know that the Allison effect is gone. It never
would be anything. And that's what I mean
about these other things. We've waited long
enough now. This whole pattern of things fits
together with the idea that you're at a threshold.
You're right at the point where things are very
difficult to see -- that's what I want to bring out.
Now, in Pasteur's experiments, when he killed
anthrax in animals, he got 25 right out of 25.
The sheep all died or they didn't die. There
was no threshold value about it, People who
didn't know anything about it might have thought
so, but when they saw one experiment they
were convinced.
One more question -
Q.
These criteria that you put down would apply
very, well to the theory of relativity with mea-
surements of very small fractions of a degree
of are in the neighborhood of a bright disk of the
sun
A.
Yes, well now take an example I've often thought
of. There are lots of scientific instances. They
go through the same sort of stage. For instance.
in Laue and Bragg's theory of x-rays being
electromagnetic waves. When the first reports
came out you had to keep an absolutely open mind
about them. You didn't know but what this was
just another case of wishful thinking. But how
long did it take? Within three or four years they
were making precision measurements of the
wavelengths of x-rays -- very, very few years.
Now, that's just what doesn't happen in these
things. So you have to wait a little time for
-
these things to prove themselves but I don't
think that you will find that there's anything more
than a superficial resemblance. Take the first
experiments of the wave theory of electrons.
The first evidence was very poor, and more
people had to be brought in, but to me the im-
portant thing was not how it looked at the time
but the quickness with which those results were
resolved as contrasted to these things that hang
fire and hang fire. Now the Davis-Barnes effect
and the N-rays were quenched suddenly; but most
of these other things go on, and on, and on, and on
(White): I believe that this is the latest lasting
colloquium we've ever had that I remember.
It was a great privilege to have such a speaker.
We thank you, Dr. Langmuir.
·
EPILOGUE ( R. N. Hall)
Pathological science is by no means a thing of
the past. In fact, a number of examples can be found
among current Literature, and it is reasonable to
suppose that the incidence of this kind of "science"
will increase at least linearly with the increase in
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scientific activity.
.
Professor Allison has retired, but in a recent
letter he wrote that his investigations of the Allison
Effect have suffered long interruptions but were
never abandoned, and he spends summers and oc-
casional weekends working on it with students at
Auburn University. The effect is also being investi-
gated under a contract with the Air Force Aero Pro-
pulsion Laboratory at the University of Dayton (9e)
Flying Saucers are still very much with us. As
Langmuir said, "Of course, the newspapers wouldn't
let a thing like that die." How right he was!
REFERENCES
1. Eight months after the visit of Langmuir and
Hewlett to Columbia and this exchange of letters,
Barnes submitted a paper on the Davis-Barnes
effect and it was published as "The Capture of
Electrons by Alpha -Partielen, " Phys. Rev. , 35.
217 (1930)
2. H. C. Webster, Nature, 126. 352 (1930)
3. B. Davis and A. H. Barnes, Phys. Rev .. 37,
1368 (1931).
4. R. Blondlot, The N-Rays, Longmans, Green and
Co., London (1905).
5. J. G. McKendrick, Nature, 72, 195 (1905).
6. R. W. Wood, Nature, 70 (1904); R. W. Wood,
Physik. Z., 5, 789 (1904). '
-
7. W. Seabrook, Doctor Wood, Harcourt, Brace,
and Co. (1941), Chap. 17.
8. For a review and bibliography, see Hollander
and Claus, J. Opt. Soc. Am. , 25, 270-286
(1935).
9. The following references on the Allison Effect
make interesting reading: (a) F. Allison and
E. S. Murphy, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 52, 3796
(1930) (b) F. Allison, Ind. Eng. Chem., 4.
9 (1932). (c) S. S. Cooper and T. R. Ball, J.
Chem. Ed. , 13, 210 (1936); also pp. 278 and
326. (d) M. A. Jeppesen and R. M. Bell, Phys.
Rev. , 47, 546 (1935). (e), H. F. Mildrum and
B. M. Schmidt, Air Force Aero Prop. Lab.
AFAPL-TR-66-52 (May 1966).
10. W. M. Latimer and H. A. Young. Phys. Rev. 44,
690 (1933).
11. This may have referred to the paper by J. L.
McGhee and M. Lawrenz, J. Am. Chem. Soc.,
54. 405 (1932), which contains the statement,
"In December 1930 one of us (McGhee) handed
out by number to Prof. Allison twelve (to him)
unknowns which were tested by him and checked
by two assistants 100 percent correctly in three
hours. " See also, T. R. Ball. Phys. Rev., 47,
548 (1935), who describes additional tests in
which unknowns were identified.
12, Some more recent discussion of Rhine's work is
to be found in: (a) G. R. Price, SeL. 122, 359
(1955), and replies on January 6, 1956. (b) M.
Gardner, Fade and Fallacies in the Name of
Science, Dover (1957).
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