Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [108]
The situation is not much different today. Associates of those who have similar misconceptions either refuse to speak up or support the insanity by trying to save the perpetrators from exposure.
N Rays having been debunked, the findings were published in Nature, picked up by La Revue Scientifique, and expanded in the latter journal. The French Academy had published more than one hundred papers about N Rays by then. After the exposure, it published only two more. Blondlot, scheduled to receive the LaLande prize, was not censured by the Academy but rather was given the prize and a gold medal as planned, though the award was presented "for his life work, taken as a whole." N Rays were not mentioned.
During my visit to France in 1978 to deliver a series of lectures about claims of paranormal events, I addressed an audience of some 140 conjurers, scientists, and reporters in the city of Nancy. Two of those present were physicists from the University of Nancy where Rene Blondlot had done his work, and where he was a professor of physics for six years after the exposure. I had found references to N Rays previously in almost every encyclopedia and science reference book I had consulted. But in that audience in Nancy, the home of N Rays, not one person had ever heard of them! Even the Larousse Encyclopedia had been washed clean of the embarrassing episode, mentioning only Blondlot's other work.
Without getting too technical for the average reader, I will try to explain a very important point concerning the N Ray case. In a standard spectroscope—an instrument that directs light through a prism to disperse it into its component colors (spectrum)—light enters through a slit. Certain kinds of light (that resulting from heating common salt—sodium chloride—in a flame, for example) breaks up not into a continuous spectrum from violet to red, as in a rainbow, but into a series of bands, each of which is as wide as the width of the slit. (In the case of heated salt, a prominent feature of the spectrum of sodium—two close bright yellow lines—shows up strongly.) Dr. Wood was astonished to find that, though the slit in Blondlot's N Ray apparatus was two millimeters wide, the scientist claimed to be making measurements as small as one tenth of a millimeter! This was a little like expecting to separate sand from birdseed by using chicken wire as a sieve. When questioned about this, Blondlot told Wood that it was one of the inexplicable properties of N Rays!
Here we have the catch. A scientist has come up with what he insists are proper observations, and upon being shown that they are not possible he falls back on the conclusion that this is a unique phenomenon that does not obey the rules governing all other phenomena, instead of concluding that there is nothing there in the first place.
It might be argued that X rays are also extraordinary, and that scientists would have failed to discover them if they had not been willing to examine the possibility that certain rays penetrate otherwise opaque objects and register on a photographic plate, and even reveal the shadows of bones in the human hand. Nothing like this had been expected, the argument continues, and, as in the case of N Rays, it was in opposition to everything that scientists of the day considered possible.
Well, not quite. Researchers had been plotting the spectrum and filling it in nicely. When they discovered that photographic plates accidentally became exposed when certain equipment was present nearby, they investigated and determined the cause. They could repeat the effect—they all could—and they had firm evidence to prove it. The question that Blondlot asked was, Do you see the lines at these determined positions? instead of, Do you see any lines, and if so, in what positions? If the latter question had been asked, N Rays