The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [163]
Around 1900 there was a general surge of interest in psychological and spiritual phenomena. Telepathy and suggestion were researched. There appeared to be links between the action of the nerves and electricity. Nancy had a distinguished psychiatric unit at which Freud studied.
Elsewhere in Europe Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, and a year later Antoine Becquerel identified radioactivity. By 1900 alpha, beta and gamma rays had been found. More were expected. In 1903 a distinguished physicist called René Blondlot, who was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a senior figure at Nancy University, announced his discovery of another ray. In honour of his city he called it the N-ray.
Blondlot had found the new form of radiation while looking at the behaviour of polarised X-rays. He had seen that the new rays, which penetrated aluminium, increased the brightness of an electric spark. The rays were also refracted by a prism and it was known that X-rays could not be refracted in this way. Since the scientific community expected new rays to be found, Blondlot’s work immediately attracted dozens of young graduates keen to make their name in this new field.
Within three years three hundred papers had been written on the subject, and doctoral theses were being prepared. Not only did the rays traverse material opaque to light, but, extraordinarily, they were given off by the muscles of the human body. Moreover, N-rays heightened perception and they were produced by the human nervous system particularly during intellectual exertion. Was there a relationship between the mysterious N-rays and the psyche? In 1904 Blondlot was awarded the prestigious Prix Lecomte by the Academy of Sciences.
The crucial stage in the experiment proving the existence of N-rays was the brightening of the spark, which Blondlot always insisted had to be feeble. The trouble was that nobody outside the city of Nancy could see differences in the brightness. In September 1904 an American Professor of Physics, R. W. Wood, arrived in Nancy and Blondlot demonstrated the effect for him. Wood, too, was unable to see changes in the spark. He had previously noted that with the equipment currently available the minimum natural variation to which any spark’s brightness could be controlled was as much as 25 per cent. Spark brightness was obviously a dubious criterion of measurement. It was when Blondlot used a prism to refract and split the N-rays so as to show the spread of their wavelength that Wood decided to act. While his French hosts were busy in the dark, Wood removed the prism. The demonstrators continued to see the N-rays. Wood published his story the same month. No more N-rays were observed. The discipline collapsed as quickly as it had appeared.
There was never any suggestion that Blondlot was a charlatan. He and his colleagues were victims of the expectation that N-rays would be discovered and when they built instruments to see the rays, they saw them. For a short time this non-existent phenomenon resisted the most stringent tests and methods known to science.
At every level of its operation, from the cosmos to the laboratory bench, the structure controls observation and investigation. Each stage of research is carried out in response to a prediction based on a hypothesis about what the result will be. Failure to obtain that result is usually dismissed as experiment failure. Every attempt is made to accommodate anomalies by a minor adjustment to the mechanism of the structure, as was the case with Ptolemy’s epicycles or Descartes