Page 154 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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PatHoloGiCal SCienCe

Pathological Science—the science of things that aren’t so.

—Irving Langmuir, “Pathological Science”

rving Langmuir (1881–1957), Nobel laureate in chemistry, quintes-
sential industrial scientist, and associate director of research at the
I General Electric Corporation in Schenectady, New York, was both a
rain king and a friend of weather warriors. He was also the leader of a research
team that included Vincent Schaefer (1906–1993), “the snowflake scientist,” who
developed dry ice seeding, and Bernard Vonnegut (1914–1997), who identified
the chemical silver iodide as a cloud-seeding agent. Langmuir’s work in surface
chemistry was solid, even brilliant, and his scientific intuition was usually quite
sound. By some measures he was considered to be a genius and was by no means
a charlatan. Yet his work in weather control exemplified his own warnings about
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pathological possibilities of science gone awry.
In 1953 at GE’s Knolls Research Laboratory, Langmuir presented a seminar
titled “Pathological Science,” on “the science of things that aren’t so.” He cited
a number of examples of this phenomenon, some drawn from the history of
laboratory science and some from popular culture. Among them were Prosper-
René Blondlot’s nonexistent N-rays (1903), so subtle that only a Frenchman
could see them; the “mitogenic rays” (1920s) of the Russian biologist Alexandr