CIA-RDP96-00791R000100490001-4.pdf

Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000100490001-4- PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE L Langruir (Colloquium at The Knolls Research Laboratory, December 18, 1953) Transeribed and edited by R. N. Hall PREFACE On December 18, 1983, Dr. Irving Langmuir +» gave a colloquium at the Research Laboratory that ’ will long be remembered by thoge in his audience, . The talk waa concerned with what Langmuir called ae, the acience of things that aren't so,“ and in it he gave “! @ colorful account of several examples of a particular _ kind of pitfall into which scientists may sometimes , atumble. to Langmu…

‘ eounted over here. field you could deflect the alpha particles 80 they go Oa eel £00°39d ——_ — —— —_—— — ——— or ome ee Se et Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000100490001-4 a stream of electrons moving slong 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 $90 volts here, accel- erating the electrons, the electrons would travel along with the alpha particles and the idea of the experiment waa that if they moved along toget…

we oe — ome than it can be done by studying the hydrogen spectrum, which ia something like one in 10%, At any rate, ‘they “bad 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 d¢ 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 hia talk, a few other…

ees ~ + + ++ ‘Approved For Release 2000/08/10: CIA-R eee 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 sead the acale on that meter. And it was dark except for the dial of a clock and he counted scintillations for two ‘minutes, ‘He said he always counted for two minutes, Actually, Ihad a stop watch and I checked him up, They sometimes were as low 48 one minute and ten seconds and aometimes one minute and fifty-five seconds but he counted them all as two minutes, and ., yet the resulta were of hig…

Appr 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 Dashes, Those things are only due.to radioactive contamination or something elae." He had a reason for rejecting the very essence of the thing that was tmportant, So I wrote all this down in this letter and I got no response, no ennouragement, 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 la…

ee ee “Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791R000100490001-4 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 ilke negative N-raya. He called them N'- rays, The effect of the N’-rays is to decrease the visibility of a faintly iduminated slit, That works too, but only if 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 this point of view. It decreases if you look …

ees 7 f / /; ——S , ee eee, ee — gave off mitogenetie rays, anything that remotely had anything to do with Uving things. And then they started to use photoelectric cells 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 bave different opinions as to whether it did or didn't show this eff…

ee a ee Mad 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(9) 3 atarted in 1927, There were hun- . dreds of papers published in the American Physical . Society, the Physical Review, the Journal of the . American Chernical 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~ :. gintym, a whole series of elements and isotopes were discovered by Aliison…