Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791RO001004900014~ PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE L Langmuir (Cclloquium at The Knolls Research Laboratory, December 18, 1953) Traneetribed and edited by X N. Hall MEFACE Content$: on December 18. 1953. Dr .. Irving Langmuir Characteristic Symptoms Of gave Z colloquiUVA at theRescarch Laboratory that pathological Science 7 winlong be remembered by those in his audience. Allisork Effect 8 The talk was concerned with what Langmuir called Extrasensory Perception 9 wthe science of things that aren't no, I and in it be gave Flying Saucers 11 .:.A Colorful account of several examples of a particular Question Period 11 kind of pitfall Into which scientists may sometimes Epilogue 12 stumble. References 23 Lungmuir never published his investigations into the subject of Pathological Scie=e, , A tape recording was made of his speech. but this has been lost or erased. Recently, however, a microgroovedisk tran- acription 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 edging 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 I back onto tape. and a copy in on Me In the Whitney -Library. Gratitude is heropy 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 beat possible copy of the Langmuir speech. and for providing access to other related Langmuir papera6 COLLOQUMM ON PATHOLC*ICAL SCIENCE, b7 Irving Lang=uir This is recorded by Irving Zangmulr on March 8, 1954. It In transcribed from a tape recording, section number,.three. of the lecture on tFathological, Scienceo that I gave an December 18, 1063. CorAents: Davis-Barnes Wect K-Ray-5 MitogensUa Rays Davia-Barnes Effect The thing started in this way.. 4DnAprJlthe23rd.'- 1929, Professor Bergen Davis from Columbia TJni- versity came up and gave a colloquiu= in this Lab- oratory, in the old buUdIng, 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 enthu&i1Lst1c about It and he got us interested,in it, and well. 1,11 show you right on this diagram what of tMrtg happened (Fig. 1). C r G -------------- r Detail Of tllfmeft 8Md Slid rig. I Diagr2= of flr4t &xperiinqntal tube. S, radio- active source. W, thin glass window.. p. IU&mept; G. grid; R. lead to silvered surface; A. second &ncde,' M, magnetic field, C, copper scale; Y..and Z. zinc sulfide screens. He produced a beam of alpha rays from polonium in & vacuum tub*. He had a paraboue hot Cathode ±1ge electron emitter with a hole in the middle, and the alpha rays came through it 4nd'could be counted by I scintillations on a zinc 'sulfide Ocreen with a micro- 5 scope over here (Y and Z). The electrons Were fo- 6 cused On this plate, so that for a distance there was I- Approved For Release 2000/08/10 CIA-RD-P96-00791ROO0100490001-4 200 1 19ud 8T:CT r-S. 91 Nnr Approved For Release 2000/08/10: CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 that might be. Sommerield, for ex- istream of electrons moving alOr'g.w'th 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 $90 volts here, Accel- erating the electrons, the electrons would travel along with the Alpha particles and the idea of the experiment was that it they moved along together at the same ve- locity they might recombine so that the alpha particle would lose one of Its charges. would pick up an eletc- tron, so that instead of being a hellum 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 oil- culate the energy necessary to knock off this electron and soi On. account for how ample. in Germany. lie worked up a theory to Account for how the electron. could be captured if it had a ve- locity equal to what it was Sving to have after it set- tled down into the orbit. Well, there were these discrete peaks. each one correeponding to one of the energy levels in the Bohr theory of the helium atom. and nothing else. Those were the only things they recorded. So you bad these discrete peaks. Well. how wide were theyl WelL they were one hundredth of A volt wide. In other words, you had to have 00 voltse That would give you equal velocities but there wore other peaks. and I think the next velocity would be about 325. 2 volts. If you had that voltage, then you got beautiful capture. If you didn't, It you changed It by one bundredth of a volt-- nothing. It would go right from 60% down to nothing. It was a". They were only able to measure to a hurAredth of a volt so It was an all-or-none effect. Well, besides this peak at this point, there were ten or twelve different Urter In the Balmer series, all of which could be detected. and All of which had an 80% efficiency. (See F4 2. ) Tbey,ilmost completely captured all the electrons when you got exactly 'on the peak. won, what they found, Davis and Barren. was that if this velocity was =ado to be the *am* as that of the alpha particle there was a lose in the number of deflected partWes. If there were no electrons, for example. and no magnetic field, all the alpha par- ticlos would be collected over here, M and theyf 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 M But if they picked up in electron then they would only have half the charge.and therefore they would Only be deflected halt az'much and they would not strike the screen. Now the results that they got, or said they goi at that time, were very extraordinary. They found that not only did these electrons **=bin@ with the alpha particles when the electron velocity wan $90 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. AU 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. TheA they found that the ve- locity differences had to be exactly the velocities that you can calculate fr6n% the Bohr theorr. In otHer words, it the electron coming along here happened to be going with a velocity equal to the velocity that it wQuld have it It was In a Bohr orbit. then 0 will be captured. Of course, that naakes a difficulty right away be. cause In the Bohr theory when there is an electron Coming in from Influlty it has to give up half. its en- ergy to nettle into the Bohr orbit. Since ii must can- Serve energy. It ban to radiate out, and It radiates Out an Amount equa4 to the energy th'at it has left in the orbit. So, It the eltctr6n comes in with an Amount Of energy equal to the amount you are going to and up with. then YOU bav* to radiate an amount of energy Oqual. to twict that. which nobody had any evidence for- SO there WOR A little difficulty which never was quite resolved although there were two or three People Including some in Germany who worked up theories to &a J y6w Volt# Fig. 2 Electron capture as a function of Accelerating voltage. CCOPY from Barnes. Phys. Rev. . 35. 217 (1930).) -7- Well. in the discussion. WO guestioned how. ex- perLmentally, you could examine the whole spectrum.. because *Ach count, you see. tak*s a long time. There was a long series of alpha particle counts. that took two minutes at & 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 ya~t have to go through steps Of A hundredth of -a volt each And to cc" r an the range from 330 up to 000 volts, youldhave quite a job. (lAught*r) Wello they said that they didnot do It quite that way. They had found by some preliminary work that they did check with the Bohr orbit velocities go they know where to look for them. They found them Sometimes not exactly where theY expected theta, but they explored around in that neighborhood and the re. sUlt was that they got thein with extraordinary pre- CiSion, So high, In fact, that they wore sure they'd be able to check the RYdbcrg constant more accurately Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791 ROOO 1 00490QQI--d- 600 * 391dd GG, 9T Nnr--__-'_ Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791RO60100490001-4 than it can be done by studying the hydrogen spectrum. which to something like one in W, At any rate. 'they had no inh Itions at all as to the accuracy which covid be obtained by this raethod especially since they were measuring these voltages within a hundredth of a volt. Anybody who look# a~ 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 ,NA exactly 0. homogeneous field. The distance was only about 5 a= 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 wivrayx around'80%. The curves would come along Uke this an a funCtiod of voltage (Fig. 2~ The curve would come along at about 80% and there would be a a" 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 intbresting.0 he said, $Flt doesn't depend'at all upon current density. We asked, wHow =uch could you change the tem- perature of the cathode here?' xWell, 0 he said. "that's the queer thing about it you can change It- All the way down to rom temper- ature. 0 (Laughter) xWell, 4 1 said. *then you wouldn't have any elec- w0h, yes. 0 be said, *if you check the Itichardson equation " calculate, you'll lind that you get elee- trons wren at room temperature and those are the ones that are captured. "Well, 0 1 said. wthere wouldn't be enough to com.- b1ze with an the alpha particles and, besider that, the alpha particles are only then for a short time as they pass through and the electrons a" a long way &part at ouch low current densities. at 10 -Namperes or 8*6 w (Laughter) No said. OTbait seemed like quite a great diffl- culty. But.* he maid, wyou see it isn't so bad be- cause we now know that the electrons are waves. So the electron doeoWt have to be there at an in order to combine with something. Only the waves have to be there and they can be of low intensity and the quantum Aheory causes m.11 the electrow to pU* in at just- the right place where they are neoded. 11% So be saw no difficulty. And so it went. Well. Dr. Whitney Mica the 4perimental method; &ad these were experiments, veO careful experi- ments. described In great dets4l. and the results seemed to be very Interesting from a theoretical point of view.. go Dr. Whitney suggested that he woul4 Me to see these expqr1mentm repeated with a gelger counter instead of counting scintillations, and C.11. Hewlett. who was here working on geiger counters, had 4L setup and It was proposed that we would give him on4i of these, maybe at a Coat of several thousand dollars or so for the whole equ$pment. 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 inean. Well, Hewlett was very much interested and r was interested so only about two days later, after this colloquium, we went down to New York. Wewent to Davis's Laboratory at Colurnbia 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 tho morning. We sat in the dark room for half an hour to get our eyes adapted to the darkness so that we could count 5clatillatiom I amid. first I would like to see these scintillations with the field on and with the field oft So I looked In and I counted about 50 or 60. Hewlett couiited 70, and I counted somewhat lower. On the other hand, We both agreed substAntiany. - What we found was this. These scintillations were.quite bright with your eyes adapted, and there was !A* trouble at anabout counting them, - when ihase alpha particles atruck the screen. They came along at a rate of about I per second, When you put on a mag- netic tield and deflected them out, the count carne down to about 17, which was a pretty high porcentage, about 23%backgrounfL Barnes was sitting with us, and he said that's probably radioactive contamination of the screen. Then, Barnes counted and he got 230 an the first count and about 200 on the next. and when he put on the field it went down to about 2& Well, Hewlett and I didn't know what that meant but we , couldnOt 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 name 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 an events, They clearly were not particles that struck the screen where yom sawlt.. but nevertheless, they seemed to give a dif- fuse glOw and they came at discrete IMervals and you could count those if you wante4 Well, Hewlett counted those too and I didn't. That accounted for s6me dif- ference. Well. we didn't bother to check into this, and wevient on. WelL I don't want to spend too muth jinji on this exporimenL I have a 22-page, letter that I irriotO about theme things and I have a lot of notes. .'.The gist of It "a this. There was A long table at whiiih Barnes Was fitting. and he had another table over Mie*where he had an assistant of his named Run iiho'eat be" looking at a big scale voltmeter. or p6tentlo`mi eter really. but It had a scale that want from one to a. thousand volts and Ott that scale that went froi:ncne - to; a thousand, he read hundredths of &'*olt. (TAughte 0 He thought he migiit be able to do a little better than -3- Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 POO,39ud 08:CT GG, 91 Nnr -R61ea'sj--2odb/66-/16*: i57io~--RbP-96-00791ROO0100490001-4 Appro~e*Tror that. At any rate. you could interpolate and put down figures. you know. Now the room wan dark except for a little light here ouwhich you could read the scale on that motor. And it was dark except for the dial of a clock and he counted scintillations for two minutes. voltages that were applied. Whether the voltage was at one value or another didn't make the slighto at dif - ference. After that he took twelve readings. of which about balf of thena were right and the other half were wrong, which was about what you woQld expect out Of two sets of values, He said he always counted for two minutes. Actually, I had a stop watch and I *backed him up. They sometimes were as low an qno minute and ton seconds and sometimes one minuto And fifty-five se,conds 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 aft the voltage entirely. Well, then Barnes got some low values around 20 or 30. or sometimes 60 high an 60. Then to got the conditions on a peak he adjusted the voltage to two hundred and --, well some of those readings are interesting; 325. 01. That'* the Agare I put down. and there he got only a reading of 62, whereas before when he was on the peak, he got about 230. IT* dLdn*t like that very =uch so he tried changing this to . 021 a change of one hun- dredth of a volt- And there be got 48. Then he went In between. (IAughter) They fell off, you see, ao he tried 325. 016 And then he got 107. So that was a peak. W01L & UttlG lAter. I whispered to'%ull who was over here adjusting the voltage, holding It constant, I SU9905104 to him to make It ono tenth of a volt dif- ferettt~ Barnes didn't know this and he got 00. Well, when Z suggested this change to Bull, you could see Immediately that he was amazed. He said, NWhyj that's too big a chiLngo. That will put It Way off the peak. 0 That was almost one tenth of a volt, you see. ;Ater I xuggested tOing a whole volt. flAughter) Then we had lunch. We oat for half an hour In the dark room NO as not to spoil our eyes and then we bad 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 an a .:card of Paper 10 different sequences of V and 0. 1 utiant to put an a certain voltage and then take it off 4811L LAter I realized that that wasn't quite right 'b0c*uve when Bull took off the voltage, he oat back in his chair--there was nothing to regulate at zero, so he didn't. Well, of course, Barnes saw him when. ever be oat back In hU chair. Although. the ligl# Wasn't verY bright. he could act whether he was sifting back In his coaIr or not so he know the voltage Wasn't On and the rc volt was that he got,* correspond. tug result. Be later w whispered, *Dontt let him know that you're not re&dL 9,0 and I asked hUn to change the voltage from 325 down to $20 so he Od have some. thI4 to regulate and I said, 'Regulate it just as c4re- fully &8 it You W4TT sitting an a peak. 0 So he played the Part from that _me on, and from that time on Barnes' readings 1-.%d nothing whatever to do with the I said, wYou'rethrougb. Tou're riot measuring anything at AM You never have measured anything at All. Men," he said, "the tube was gassy. (LAughter) The temperature has changed and therefore ihe nickel plates must have deformed themselves so that the electrodes Are no longer Uned up properly.* "Well, 11 1 said, "isn't this the tube in which Davis said he got the same results *hon the filament was turned off complatelyr 00h, yes, 0 he said. wbut we always made blanks to check ourselves, with and without the voltage on. He tm=ediately- -without g~vtnt arq thought to It--he immediately had an excuse. He had a reason for not Paying Any attention to any wrong results. It, Just wan built into him. He just had worked that way an along And always would. There In no question but What he is honestj he believed these things. absolutely. Hewlett stayed there and continued to work with him for quite 4 while and I want in and talked it over with. Davis and he was simply dumbfounded. ' He couldntt believe a word of IL at gaidA *It absolutely can't be, 0 he said. PLook at the way we found those peaks before we knew anything about the N-ohr theory. We took those values and calculated them up and them checked exactly. JAter on. after we got confirmation, In order to save time, to see whether the peaks were there we WOUld calOulaLtv ahead of time, R 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 wouldWt believe it. Well. he had just read IL paper before the Re- search Laboratory at Schenectady. and he was going to read the paper the followi%ig Saturday before the National Academy of Sciences; which he did. and gave the whole paper. And be wrote me that he,was going 10 do so an the 24M I wrote to him on'the day after I got back. Our letters crossed In the malls and'he said that he had been thinking over the various things that I had told him. and his confidence *'asn!i shaken. so he went ahead and Presented the'papoir before the National Academy of Selences. Then I wrote him a 32-pago letter givh* all our data and showing really that the whole approach to the thing was wrong# that he was counting hallucl. nations, which I Q is common among People who *ork with scintillations 11 they count for too long. Barnes counted for six hours a day and it Miir fa- tigued hiaL Of course It didn't f9tiVM hUn,, because It was all made up out of his heads (lAughter) He 900 ' 39UdApproved For Ref~ase iMiO010 : (5-R-Ot-DR-6-0-07 12:CT 26, 91 Nnr Approved For Release 2000/08/16 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 told us that you mustn't count the bright particles. He had a beautiful reason for why you, rmustn'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 contamimition or something else. 0 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 Lt. He went to Europe for a six months leave of absence, came back later. and I took up the matter with him agalm(l) In the meandme, I Zen, a copy of the letter that I had written to Davis to Bohr asking hiza to hold Lt confidential but to pass it on to various people who would be trying to repeat these experiments. To Professor S*mmerfeld and other people and it headed off a lot of Merimettal, 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 halt later, in 1031, there was just a short little article in the Phyalcal Review in which they that they haven8t been able to reproduce the effe&f3aT wThe results reported in the earlier paper depenoed upon observations made by counting scintillations visually. The scintillations produced by alpha par- Ucles on a zinc suMde screen are a threshold phs- 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 pasy, Maughter) 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 thiTddng of other things. I had seen P. W. Wood and told him about this phenom- enou because he's a good experimenter and doesn't make such mistakes himself very often. it at all. And he told me about the 14-ra:~s that be had an ex- pericnce with back in 1904. So I looked up the data on the N-rays. (4. 5) lq-ra in 1003. Blondlot. who was a well-thought-of Frencti scientist, member of the Academy of Sciences. was experimenting with x-rays as almost everybody was In these days, The effect that he observed was something of Mv sort. i won't give.ibe whole of It. IT just give a few outstanding points. No found that if you have a hot wire, a platinurn.wire, or a Nernst filament or aqrthing that's heated very hot Inside an . iron tub* and you hwve a window cut in it and you have a piece of aluminwn about 1/8 of an Loch thick on it.'that some rays come out through that aluminum. window. - Oh. It can be an much an two or three inches thick and go through aluminUm# the$* rays can.- but not through iron. The rays that come out of this little window fail on a faintly inuadnated object. so that you "n just barely a** it. You Tnuat aft In a dark room for a long time and he used a calcium sulfide screen which cin be illuminated with light and gave out a very faint glow which could be seen in a dark roonL 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 14mp.an so that thee* rays that come ovt of this little aluminum, slit would fall on this piece of paper that you are looking at, you could see a 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. Yon don't look directly at It. He said that would tire your eyes. Look away from it. and he said pretty soon you'll Mic Lt. or you -don't see it.. depending on whether the N-raya are shining an this piece of paper. In that way. you can detect whether or not the X-rays are acting. wen. 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 *buld store X-rays " give off the X-rays 'even with the black paper on It. Hat would bring It into.the lab- oratory and you then hold that near the piece of paper -that you're looking at. faintly Illuminated, ",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 " would lot a be&= of X-rays from two slits come over and he would find exactly where this thing tMensified its beam. Wen. you'd think he'd make such experimentg as this. To see if with ten bricks you got a stroWr effect tbAnyou did with one. No. not at all. 1to 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 set it or whether you couldn't see It. And there, the X-rays wore very important. Now, a little later, he found that marW kinds.of things gave off N-rays. A human being gave off X-rays, for example. It someone else came Into the room, then you probably could see it. He also found that if someone made a laud noise that would spoil. the effect. You had to be silent. Heat, however. Increased the effect. radiant heat. Yet that wavWJ N-rays itself, X-rays we" not heat because host wouldn't go through 41wninvmL 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 cloa* to your head it cools .a- Approved For Release 2000108110 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 900 * 30(Jd Z~2161 961 91 Nnr '. .. - .,-- - , - _ j_ -_ - .- - .- I Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 through. your skull and It allows you to nee the paper better. Or you can hold the brick near the paper. that's all right tog. Now be found "t there were some other things tho,t *Ore like negative X-ray& go called them N1- rays. The ettect of the NI-rays is to decrease the visibilitr of a faintly Illuminated alit. That work* too, but cray it the angle of Incidence is right. if you look at It tangentially you find that the thing In- creases the Intensity when you look at it from thia point of view. It decreases if you look at it normally -and it Increanes if you look at It tangentially. All of which Is verr Interesting, And he published many papers on it. One right after the other and other people did too, contirming BloncUot's reaultx. And there were lots of papers published and at one time about half of them that were confirming the results of Blondlot. You met, X-rays ought to be -important because x-rays were known to be importam and alpha rays were, and N-rays were somewhere in be - twacen so N-rays must he very Ituportant. (Laughter) Wail, IL W. Wood heard about these experi- =onto- -everybody did more or less. So F. W. Wood went over there and at -that time Blondlot had a prism. quite a large prism of aluminura, with a 601* "1e and he bad a Nernst filament with a little alit about 2 mm wide. There were two slits, 2 mm wide each. This beam fell on the prism- and was retracted and be =assured the refractive Index to three signUicant figures. He found that It wasn't monochromatic, that there were several different components to the X-rayv and he found different refractive Indices for each of these components. He could measure three *r four different refractive WIces each to two or three Significant 11gures, and he was repeating name of these amd showing how accurately they were re- POatable, Shm"49 it to & W. Wood in this dark room Wall, 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 == wide, and Wood asked him about that He said. wHow? How could you. from just the optics Of the thin& with allts two millimeters wide, h9w doyou get a beam so-fine that you can detect its positE012 WIMA A tenth Of A millimeter?W Blondlot Said, OThat's one of the fascinating things about the X-rays. They donit follow the or- dinarY laws of Science that you ordinarily think of. R Us Said. 4You have to consider these things all by themselves. They are very Interesting. but you have to discover the laws that govern them. N WelL in the Meantime, tho rom being very dark. Wood asked him to repeat Some of theme me&' suremeilts which he was only too glad to do. But in the meantime, R. W. Wood put the prism in ids Pocket and the results checked perfectly with what he had before. (Lau . jhter) Well. Wood rather cruelly published that. (6, ) And that was the end of lalandloL Nobody accounts for by what methods he could reproduce those results to a tenth of a millimeter. Wood said that he seemed %a, be ablo to do it but no- body wWerstands that. Nobody understands lots of things. But some of the Germans came out later-- Prlzgsheim was one of them--came out with an ex- tremely interesting story. They had tried to repeat some of Slondlatts experiments and had found this. - One of the experiments was to have a very fatat 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 thin 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 Slondlot made was that the experiment was made much better.. if you had some X-rays falling on the piece of paper. Pringxheim was repeating these in Germany and he found that if you didn't know where the paper wag. whether It was here or here (in front or behind your hand), It worked just an well. That 19, you could see your hand just as well if you held It back of the paper an if you held It in front of it. Which is the natural thing. because this is a threshold phenomenon. And a thr;eshold phenomenon means that you don't know, nu. really don't know, whether You are seeing it or not. But Ifyou have yourband there, well. of course. you see your hand because you know your hand's there, and that's 3ust enough to win you over to where you know that you see it. But you know it just as wen if the paper happens to be in front of your'hand instead of In back of your band, because you don't know where the paper to but you do know where your hand is. (Laughter) Mito onetic Aaym Well, let's go on, About 1923. there wag a whole AeTICS of papers by Gurwitsch and others. There were hundreds of them published on mitogenetic rgy&(8) There are Still a few of them being publ1afted. I don't know how many of you have ever'heard of mitogenetic ray%. 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 90 through quartz but not through SUMS. They seemed to be some sort of ultraviolet lighL The way they studied these was this. you had Boma onion roots-*nions growing in the dark or in the light and the roots win 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 dovm and another onion root came nearby,, thin would develop so that there Were more cells an one side than the other. one of the tests they had made at first was thet this root would bond away. And as It grew this would change -in direction which was evidence that Something bad traveled from One OnICA root to the othor. And if you had a piece Of quartz in between It would do It, but if you put 91430 In between it wouldntt. 80 this radiation would not go through glass but It would 90 through quartz. Wen, it started in that way. Then everinhing 4- A -proved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791 R0001 00490001-4 400 ' TDUY U:61 GG- 91 Nnr Approved For Release 2000108/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 gave off mitogenetip rays, anythilmg that remotely bad anything to do with living things. And then they sUkrtea to use photoelectric cells, to check it and whatever they did they PrAcLicallY always found that if you got the conditions just right, you could Just detect it and prove ft. But if you looked over these photographic plate* that showed this ultraviolet light you found that the amount of light was not much bigger than. the nat- *=I particles a the photographic plate so that people could have different opinions an to whether it did or didn19 show this effect and the result was that less than half of the people who tried to repeat these ex- perLtnerits got any confirmation of It; and to it Went. Well. Ill go on before I got too far along. Characteristic Symptoms of Flathological Science The characteristics of thin Davis-Barnes exper- iment and the X-rays and the mitogenetic rays, they have things in common. Theme are cases where there Is no dishonesty Involved but where people are tricked into false results by 06 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- ample# of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been publiehed upon them Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away. Now, the characteristic rules are theme (see Table lk TABLE I Symptoms of Pathological science. I. The m&xi=um *fleet that is observed is pro- duced by a causative agent of barely detect- able Udenatty, And the magnitude of the ef - fect Is substantially Wependent of the intensity of the cause, 2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains 01060 to tbA limit of detectabilityj or, many measurements A" necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results. 3. CJALMS of great accuracy. 4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience. k Criticism# are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment 0- Ratio C(SuPpOrters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then tang gradually to ablivion. that by putting on an Ultraviolet source of light u could get it to work better. Oh nol OH NV. It Cd to be Juat the *Lmount of intensity that's giveft off by an onion root. Ton onion roots w*Wdalt do any better than one and It doesn't inake any difference about the dUtanco of the sourcC It doesn't C*Uow any in. verge square law or anything as simple as that. and so on. In other words, the effect is independent of the intensity of the causi.-That was true in the mitogen4tic my$, and it .wan tme in the N-rays. Ton bricks didn't have sM more affect than one. It bad to be of low intensity. We know why it bad to be of low intensitr. so that you could fool yourself so easily. Otherwise, It wouldnOt wor)L Davis-Bgrnes worked just 4ke well when the filament was turned off. They counted scintillations. A=thor characteristic thing abo~ them an i's . that, these obserntions are near the threshold of visibility of the eyes. Ai5; other sense, I suppose would work as welL Or many midusurements are necessary, !n~ meanurements becaus~~e~low 8tati8tical SignUicance of the roe In the mito- genetic mys particularly,it start;d-out by teeing something that was bent. Later on, they would take a hundred onion roots and expose them to sornething and they would get the average position of all of them to get whether the average had been &Heated a little bit by an appreciable a=ount 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 habit with most People. that when =casurezftents.,of low sjgr~f. can" are taken they find means of rejecting data. They are right at the threshold value and there are MaW reasons WhY You'can discard data. Mvis and Barnes were doing that right &20n& If things were doubtful at all why they would discard them or not discard them depending OU whether or not they, fit the theory. They didn't know that. but thatig the wa) it worked out. The maximum offect that to observed Is prod uced by a causative agent of bareLY Me table intenaity, For example, YOU mIght think that if one onion root would affect another due to ultraviolet light, youed think There are claims of great_aacuracy, Sarnes we going to get th Rydberg constant more act-dr&te17 than the spectroscopists couU Great sensitivity or great sPecificitY, wooll come across that particul&rl- in the Allison effect. 80 0 3 E) U Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791 R0001 00490001-4 C8:61 S6, 91 Nnr FeLntactio theories contra_r7_to experience, In U Bohr theor7~ the whole iaia-of &A GTO-Q-troubein qap tured by an alpha particle when the alpha particles aren't there just because the waves are the" doex,t Make a very sensible theory. Criticism* are met by ad boo exc%T-06 thought ul On the spur of the moment. They ulw&78-hrd ~&n' answer--alwaye. The ratio of the supporters to the critics riffes somewhere near 50% and t --r-4-3clu-Z g _thU K-F-5-731-MUM. lly to reprdt: - I Oblivioa The crlUcs canit repr uce t acts. Only M-15 supPortere Could do thAL In the end, nothi, was salvaged. Why should there be? There Isq1t OrlYthing tbare. There never was. Thatf a Approved For Release 2000108/10 : CIA-RDP96-0079,lRO00100490001-4 characteristic of the effect. WelL I'll go quieldy on to some of the other things. -Anison wam The Allison effect in one of the most extraor- dinary of all.(O) It started in 1927. There were hun- dreds of papers publl4hed in the American Physical Soctety~ 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 now elements discovered- -Ala~amine, Vir- ginium IL whole series of elements and isotopes were discovered by Allison. The effect was very simple. There Is the Faraday affect by which a beam of polarized light pas" through a liquid which Is in a magnetic field in rotated--the plane of polarization in rotated by a longitudinal magnetic field. Now that idea has been known for a long time and It his a great deal of im- portazme 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 M& 31 They bad a glass cell and s, coil , of wire around it Mt. 82) and you have wires coming up here. a Ucher system Here you have a spark gap, so a Cash of light comes through here and goes through a 141col 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 call so that there was a steady light over here. it you have a beam of light and you polarit a It and then you turn on a ma gnetic fteld,: why you see that you could rotate the plans of polarizatiort. There will, be an Increase In the brightness of the light when you put a magnetic field on hem 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. qnd by sliding this wire along the trolley of the Lecher arstem. they could cause a compensating delAy. The sensivity of this thing was so great that they could detect,diff or- e=ex of about 3 x 10"Oseconds. 33y looking in here Fig. 3 Mgram of apparatus and connecUons. jCoW from P. Allison, Phys. Rev. , 30. 66 (102T). Fig. I I they could see these flashes of light, the light from the sparks, and they tried to decide as they changed the position of this tralley whether it got brighter or dimmer and they set it for a rninlmun,4 and measured the positioix of the trolley. They put In here--in this glass tube--they p4 a water solution and added sorne salt to it. And they found that the time lag wai' changed, so that they got a change In the time lag de- pending upon the presence of salts. Now they first found--v*ry quickly--that if you put In a thing like ethyl alcohol that you got one char- acterivtic time IAC. 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 &u4 find the acetic acid and the ethyl alcohol. Then they began to study Falt solutions and they found that only the metal elements counted but they didn't act at an ion. That is. all potassium ions weren't the same, but potassium nitrate and potassium chloride and potassium sulfate an had quite characteristic different poir4s, that were a characteristic of the coiMpound. It was only the positive ion that counted " 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 20-8 molar solution would always produce the max- imum elfect, 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 qvantitative 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 10-1 In concentration, or something of that Sort and then the effect would disappear. Otherwise. you would get It, no that you could detect the limit within this extraordirary degree of accuracy. Well. they found -that things were entirely dif. ferent, even In these very dilute solutiong, In sodium nitrate from what It wax with sodium chloride. Nevertheless, it was a characteristic which depended upon the compound even though the compound was disassociated Into ions at those concentration@. That didn't make any difference but It was fact that wits experimentally proven. They then went on to find that the isotopes all stick right out like sore thumbs with great regularity. In the ease of lead, they found sixteen isotopes. These isotopes were quite regularly spaced so that you could got 26 different positions and you could assign numbers to those Do that you can identify them and tell which they are, Unfortunately, you cculdnOt got the con- CentrAtions quftntftxtively~ even the dilution method didn't work quite right because they wereaft all equally sensitive. You could get them relatively but only XPProximately-. Well. it became Important as a means of detecting elements that hadn't yet been dlocovered~ like Alabam' and elements that arg now known, and filling out the periodic table.. All the 600' 39t4pproved For Release 2000/08/10 CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 t7Z:61 GG, 91 Nnr ApproveTForkele'a*se' 2066ibiFio elements in the periodic table were filled out that way and published. But a little later, in 1945 or 48, 1 was at the University of California. Owen Latimer who is now Head of the Chemistry Department there--not Owen Latimer, Wendell "timer--had had a bet with G. N. Lewis (in 1932X Re said, wThere's something funny about this Allison effect how they can detect isotopes." Ile had known somebody who had been down with Allison and who lad been very much Impressed by the effect and he said to Lewis. "I think 1111 go down and see Allison, to Alabasna. and see what there to in It I'd like to use some of these methods. Now people had begun to talk about spectroscopic 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 amowAs. There was a little spectroscopic evidence for it and Latimer said, *Well. this might be a way of finding It. I'd like to be able to find it, 4 So he went and, f,,Ient three weeks at Alabama with Allison and before he went he talked It over with M N. Lewis about what he thought the prospects were and Lewis said, 91111 bet you ton dollars rouOllfind that tbArele nothing init.11 And so they had this bet on. He went down there and he came back. Ile set up the apparatus and made it work so well that 0. X. Lewis pald him the ten dollars. (Laughter) He then discovered tritium and e Pub- Whed an artWe in the Physical Re_ _. ~ 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 eatimate as to its concentration. Well. nothing more was heard about it. I saw him ther4 seven or eight years after that. I had written then* things up before. about this Allison offe" and I told him about this point cA view and how the Allison effect fits all these characteristics. Wall, I know at that time at one of the rAcetings,of ghe American Chemical Society there k.%* great discussion as to whether to accept papers on t4o Allison effect. There they decided: Nm they would not accept any more papers on the AtIleon effect,' and I guess the Physical Review did tm At any rate, the American Chemical Society decided Mat they would not accept .any more wanu cripts on the Allison effect. How- ever, aftez.~they had adopted that as a firm policy. they did ac6pt one more a year or two later because here was & can* where all the people in the faculty here had chosen twenty or thirty differeM solutions that they had inade up and they had labeled them all secretly and they had taken every precaution to make sure that nobody knew what was In these aoluftons, and they had given them to Allison and he had used his method an them and he had gotten them all right, al~hou 4 sgdh many qf them were at concentrations of to I n so on, molar. That was sufficiently defi- n1to-r-good. experimental met~ods-and It was accepted fat, publication by the American Chemical Society but that was the last.0 0 You'd think that would be the beginning, not the end. Anyway, Lattiner said. 'You know, I don1t know what was wrong with me at that time.00 ITe gold, ItAfter I published that paper I never could repeat the experiments agairL I haven't the least Idea whe PIDut.0 he said. *Those results were wonderful, I showed them to G. X. lAvis and we both agreed that it was all right They were clean out. I checked myself every way I knew how to. I don't know what also I could have done, but later on I just couldn It ever do it again. I don't know what it is. That's the kind of thing.. that happens In an of thene.. An 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 alculate those things from the Bohr theory, that they were found by em- pirical methods without any idea of the theory~' Barnes made the expertmenta brought them In to Davis. and Davis calculated them up ani~ discovered all, of a sudden that they fit t~ho Bohr theory. Re maid 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 accour! -for it. - All I know in that there was nothing salvaged at the end, and therefore none of it wits ever right, and Barnes never did see a peak. You cRn't have a thing halfway right. Extrapensary Perception Well. there's Rhine. I spent a day with Rhine at Duke University at the meeting of the American Chemical Society, probably about 19 34. - Rhine had published a book and I'll just tellyou a few things. First of all, I went In and told Rhine these things. I told hiiii the whole story~ I said these things (Tabl* 1) are the characteristics of those things that arelt so. They are all charicteristics 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. IN He said, wild have more graduate students. We ought to have more graduate students. This thing is so important that we should have more people realize its izaportinclL This should be one of the biggest departments in the'university. W91L I Won't tell you the whole sfo7,!rith Rhine, b--cause I talked with Win aU day. -Be uses' cards which you guess at by turning over, You have extra. 540morY 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 mir4 The other , thing in for nobody to know what the cards are, in which come they are turned over without &*body looking at thenu You record them knd then you look them up and so* it they check and that's telepathy. or clairvoyance rather. Telepathy to when you dan' read another person's mind. Now a later form *of the thing would be for you to decide now and write down what the cords are going .9. 0 10 390,APProved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791 R0001 00490001-4 Ga:E:1 GG, 91 Nnr r6r-Re-leas'e'. 200'0-/08-/.'10-:.Cl-A.-R-DP-96---0-0791ROO0100490001-4 to be when they are shufned tomorrow. That works too, (Laughter) All cK these things are nice examples where the magnitude, of the effect to entirely independent of, magnitude of the cause. That is, the experiments worked juat as well where the shuffting Is to be done tomorrow as when It was done some tirAe ago. It doesn't =ak* arW difference In the results. There in no appreciable difference between clairvoyance and telepathy. Although, if you try to think of the mech- ardams, of the two, It sbould be quite different. In order to get the eards to telegraph you an the infor- mation thatfn in them an to how they are arranged. and so on. when they are Stacked up an top of -such other and to have It given In the right sequence, It Is rather difficult to think of a mechanism. On the otber hand. it Is conceivable that there may be some art of Mechanism In the brain that might send out : ome, sort of unknown messages that could be picked up by some other bra.1n. That's it different order of .=&gnitudo. :A different order of dMiculty. But they were all the same from Rhi Is point of view. Well. now, the little things that I have are these. There are many more I could give yc%L Rhine said being in quite a philosophical mood, Rlt's funzV how the mind tries.to trick 7ou.0 He said. ffiPeople donot like these experiments. Vve had will'orij of these cases where the average is about 7 out of 2 5. 10 You'd expect 5 out of 25 to come right by chance and on the grand Average they come out, ch, out of Millions, or hundreds of millions of canoe, they average around 7. WelL to get 7 out of 25 would be a common enough Occurrence biat If you take a large number andyou get 7. well you doubt the statistics-or the statistical application or, above all, what I think of and Iwant to, give you reasons forthinking, -in the rejection of A SM&II percentage of the data. I'll go first before I get into what Ithine said, And say thim DAV14 LAngrnuir. a nephew of mine, who was in the Atomic Energy Comnalasion. when he was with the Radio Corporation a America a Uw YeArX 490,,he and a group of otheryoung men thought they would like to check up Rhine to work so they got some cards and they spebt ruany evenings together finding hcw these cards turned up and they got won Above 5. . They began to get quite excited xb*ut it and they kept M and they kept on. and the7 were right On the Point Of writing Rhine abmft the thing. And " kept on a little longer And things began to hL12 Out And, fall, off a Uttlo mom and they fell otf a UMO Mom - And after mar4y, majW, many days. tUL7 fell down to an Averap of Ave--grand Average--- so they didn't write to Shine- Now it Rhine had re-., celved,tUtMOVEMAU00. that this reputable body of men had 9040 ahesd &0d gotten a value of 8 or 9 or A 0After 80 UMV UUU. why he would have put a in. his book. now much at that sort of tbinr, when you are fed Infortratign of that sort by people who are Interested--how are yougoftq to weigh the things that &re pubUshed In the book? Now an illustration of how it works is this. He told me that, w People don't like =e,9 he said, wI took a lot of cards and sealed them up In envelopes and I put a code Tsumber an the outside. and I didn"t'trust anybody to know that code. Nobody#. w (A Section of the speech in missing at this point. It evidently deecribed some tests that gave &,cores below 3. ) w. . . the Idea of having this thing sealed up In the cards as though I didn't trust themm, and therefore to spite =e they made it purposely, low. *W014 0 1 Bald, wthat's interesting- -interestl:W a lot, because you said that rou,d published a sum- MAry of all of the data that you:bad. . Amd it cornegi out to bi -7. It in 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 thatr "Of course not. K he Asa xTh&t would be dig- honest. *Why would it be dlahonest7ft 'The low scores are just as Significant all the high ones, aren't they? They roved that there's something there Juat as much, erefore It wouldn't be fair. I said, sAre you going io count them. are you going to rOverge the Sign and count the= or courd !them an credits?" 'No. No. *he said. r said. "What have you done with them? Are they In your book?* XNo. 10 "Why, I thought You said that an your values were In your book. Whjr haventt you put than* In?n "Well. 11 he said. ul haven't had time to work them up.* OW61L you' know all the results. you told me the results. 'Wen, R he said. NI don't give the remdtg 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 cki thorn. Maybe hundreds of thousands of cards. He has a filing cabinet that contained nothing 'b'A those things that were done in sealed up onyolope& Amd theywere the Own that gavu the.averag* of five. W01L we'll let It siand at that. A year or so lateP* he published a now volume at his book. In that, there's a chapter on the sealed up 0&rda In the -10- 1 10 - 3E)Ukpproved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 92:61 96- 91 Nnr Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 envelopes a 'nd they aU 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 N117 Tto the public to misrepresegt this thing by including those things that prove just an 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 ou and of course it wouldn't be fair to publiglu(127 Flying Saucers I'm not coins to ialk about flying saw-ern very much except just thin. jL flying saucer in not exactly science. although some scientific people have written things about thezzu I was a member of General Schwartz's MAdvisory 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-zL 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, mYou know, Its very sorious, it really looks as though there is something there. 4 Well. I told him afterwards-4 told him this story here. I said that it seems to me from what I know about flying saucers they loolc IlUe 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 an about I didnOt want thorn *U-, I said to pick otit about thirty or forty of the beet Casco, And bring them to Schenectady, and we$lI spend a couple of days going over thera. and he d1d. Most of them were Venue 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 almostpanic. It hag cavied traffic congestion In New York City when Venus is seen in the evening near some of the buildings around Times Square and peoplethoughtit was a comet about to collide with the ~axth. or somebody from Mars, or something of that xort~. That was &-long time ago. That was thirty or foray years ago. Venus still causes flying saucers: WelL they only had one photograph or two photo- graphs t"en by one man. It looked to me like a piece of tar paper when I first saw It and the two phoWgraphs showed the thing in entirely different ohaoe& I asked for more details about it. What was the weather at tht tl=*? Well. they didn't know but they'd look It up. And they got out some papers and there it was. Itr,. i taken abwA fifteen or twenty minutes after a via wrA thunderstorm out in Ohio. Well. what's more natural than some piece at tar paper picked up by a 1.1ttle mLrdAtuxe twister and being carrIed a few the isand feet up into the clouds and it was coming do that's all. So what could it be? low".4 0BUt.it was io-14 at an enormous speed. 0 of course the map who saw " didn't have the vaguest Idea of how far away It was. That's the trouble. If you nee 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 aboui the Wed, You ask people how big the moon is. Some may it is as big an your fist, or as big as a baseball. Some say an big an a house. WelL how big In 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 thins I didn't find a single one that made any sense at all. There was nothing connistent about them. They were all things that suffered from these facts. They were all subjective. They ~rerc- an near a threshold. You don't know what the threshold in exactly in detecting the velocity of an object that you see up In the sky, where yoti don't know whether it's a thousand feet or ton thousand feet or a hundred thousand foot up. But they all fitted in with this general pattern, namely, that there doesn't seem to be &zW evidence that there Is'arything in them. AM, anyway. these,men were convinced and they ended project SIGN. And later the wholip thing was de - classined 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'lat a thing like that die. (lAughter) It keeps coming up Igainand agaiN and agaM and the old story keeps coming back again. It ilways has. 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 h People may want to go now because It's*quarter after five though I'm sure Dr. Langmuir would be' glad to discuss this some more. 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 wen that G---everythIng he ways, 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 thir;g and me orL And then the fact that no man JA his senses could discard data tbA way he did those things scaled up in the cards. So I donft hold a very high value an his work. Now the other people. I dolitt have the slightest doubt but what these men are really h6nest. They are sincere. They loved publicity, Allison. of course, loved to publish about now elements one after the other. Theme were published b y the American Chemical Societyl and Latimer liked to OubUsh his little article on tritium, the first .11- Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 210'39Ud ~.Z:CT 96, 91 Nnr Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 discovery of tritium So I think that bag 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 acierAffic desire to make dis- coveries and to understand things. Davis and Barnet were finding'thinga and it was wonderful while it lastsd. (14ebhatskyN I just wanted to point out that per- hapx the neatest comment on item four was made at the University of California when this business was discusned.at the Research Conference there in about 1930 or 32. Professor Birge said that th-is effect was just Allixon wonderland. (Laughter) (lAngmuirN Did you ever hear lAtimer talk about I*.,? (1,10hafsky Y. Well. Latimer was pushing it and you've got to allow for Latimer's persuasiveness. There were people an the faculty that I'm sure never believed it. (LLngznu1rk But it was funrq that G.V. Lewis would believe U.' do that while the thing In growing. while the thing Is being discussed. but in the and you do know that the Allison effect to gone. It never would be anything, And that's what I mean about these other things. Wetve waited long enough now. Thin whole pattern of things fit* together with the Idea that you're at a threshold. You're right at the point where things are very difficult to ace--that's what I want to bring out, Now, in Pasteur's experiments, when he killed anthrax in animals, he got 2 5 right out of 2 S. The *heap all died or they didn't die. There was no threshold value about it, People who didn't know anything about it might have thougtt no, 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 relatLvity with me&- surexnents of very sma2l fractions of a degree of are in the neighborho'od of a bright disk of the Dun. (LIebhafzkyY Well. you know that there Is a A. very close personal relationship between lAtimer and'IAwls. (LangmuirY I understand that Lewis got1back his ton dollars. (Laughter) q. How would an analysis like this apply to religious experiences? A. wen, the method of approach to reUgious questions--a, lot of people thinkyou 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 certa4n belief tries to argue with me, my reactions would be very much like this. q In getting up these criteria, you may In &.way limit the possibilities ot scientific invastlgatlor4 It occurred to me that suppose something happened in'the heavens--.eome astronomical event--that iwbody bad ever seen befom Something that happens once in a sn"I'an years. neany. I mean. supposing that you could tell. It would fit the same criterion. wouldn't U? 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. Zverybody 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 now formir 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 Yea, wall now take an exaznpl4i I've often thought of. There are lots of scientific Instances. They go through the same'vort 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 art absolutely open mind about them. You didn't know but what this wan just another case at wishful thinkinp,, But how long did It take? Within three or four years they were tanking precision measurements of the wavelengths of x-rayg--very, very few years. Now. that's just what doesn't happen in these thing&. SO YOU have t3"wait a 21itie time for these things to prove themselves but I don't think that you win 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 papple had to bo'brought I% but to me the Im- POrtant thing was not how it looked at the time but the quickness with which those results were resolved an contrasted to these things that hang fire and hang fire. Now the Mvis-Bartfes effect and the N-rays were quenched sudderdy,~ but most of these other things go on, and on. and m and on. (Whitek I believe that this in the latest lasting colloquium we've ever had that I remember. It was a great privilege to have such a speaker. We thank yov6 Dr.. Langmuir. XPILO(W-M ( R. N. Ital.1) 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 to reasonable to suppose that the Incidence of this kind of vaciencep, will increase at least linearly with the increag~ in -12- Approved For Release 2000108110: CIA-,RDP96-00791 R0001 00490001-4 91 Nnr 610,3"d t7l 0 " 3E)Ud -W10i Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001,4 scientific activity. Professor Allizoo. has retired, but in a recent letter he wrote that his investigationa of the Allizon Effect have suffered long interruptions but were never abandoned, and he spends summers and oc- easional weekends working on it with students at Auburn University. The effect is also being Lavesti- gated under a contract with the Air Force Aero Pro- pulsion LAboratory at the University Of DaytOns(96) Flying Sauchre are still very much with us. As Langmutr said, *Of course. the newspapers wouldn't lot a thing like that die. N How right he wag! RVPERENCES 1. EUht =onths after the visit of Liangmuir arA Hewlett to Colu=bia 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 -ParUclea, 0 Phys. Rev., ~LS, 217 (1930). 2. IL C. Webster, Nature, 126. 352 (1030~ 3. D. Davis andAL H. Barnes, Phys. Rev.. L7, 2368 (1931). 4. R. Blendlot The N-Rays Longmans, Green and Co., LOndLr1-qm 5. J.G. MeXendricks Nature, 72, 195 (1905). 6. R. W. Wood, Nature. 70 (1004); R. W. Wood, Pb.vsik. Z. 0. 789 (19-04X T. W. Seabrook. Doctor Wood, Harcourt. Brace, AndCo.(l940._1U ~p, = S. Iror a review and bibliography, see Hollander and Claus, J. Opts Soo. A=. 25. 270-286 (1935). V. The followIng referencee on the Allison FVect =ke interesting reading% (a) F. Allison and F-S. Murpbq, J. Ams Chem Soo., 52, 3798 (1930L (b) F. Allison. Ind. Eng. CRera., 4. 9 (1932). (a) 5. S. Cooper and T. Rs Balls 7. Cliera. Ed., 13 210(1938), also pp. 278 and 321L (d) M. iff Jeppesen and R. )4. Bell, phy6. Rev.. 47, $46 (1935). (0). IL F. Mildrum and B. M. Ohmldt. Air Force Aero Prop, Lab. AVAPL-TU-86-52 (May 1066). 10~ W. AL lAtimOr and H. A. Youngs Phys. Rev. 44, 890(1933). 11. This may have referred to the paper by J. u McGhee and X Lawrent, J. AnL Che= Soo., 34. 403 (1932). which c*nW:w the statement. % December 1930 one of us (McGhee) handed Out by nuznbOr to Prots Allison twelve (to hizn) unknowns which were tented by, him and checked _13- Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791ROO0100490001-4 by two assintaots 200 percent correctly in three hours. 11 See also. T. R. Bell. Pbys. Rev., 47. 548 (1935), who describes additional tests irr- which unknowns were Identified. 12, Some more recent discussion of Rhine's work is to be found In: (a) 0. R. Price, SaL . 122, 359 (1055). And replies an January 6. 19K-7b) M, Gardner, Fade and Fall&o1es, It& the Name of Science, 15;_v_er_r1_937). 1710'39Ud OZ:61 GGs 9T Nnr