Page 156 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

tion. In fact, at the very same time Langmuir presented his seminar on pathologi-
cal science, he was deeply involved in making highly dubious and unsupportable
claims for the efficacy of cloud seeding in creating rain, otherwise modifying the
weather, and perhaps even altering the climate. We can thus add one final criterion
supporting pathological outcomes that Langmuir did not mention in his lecture—
over-reliance on the credentials of a scientist, for example a Nobel laureate, instead
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of proof. When Robert N. Hall transcribed Langmuir’s talk, he added, editorially,
“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 is reasonable to suppose that the inci-
dence of this kind of ‘science’ will increase at least linearly with the increase in scien-
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tific activity.” If Langmuir’s lecture were to be given today, one might include such
pathologies as polywater, an illusory form of water promoted by Soviet physicists
Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Derjaguin in the 1960s, and cold fusion, purportedly
discovered by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989. A 2008 Purdue Uni-
versity report on “bubble” fusion contained the following line about the misconduct
and unsustainable claims of one of the school’s physicists, who publicly purported to
have produced nuclear energy in a tabletop experiment by making tiny bubbles col-
lapse: “From small beginnings there developed a tangled web of wishful thinking, sci-
entific misjudgment, institutional lapses and human failings.” This is pathological
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science. Langmuir’s obsessive and unbridled enthusiasm for weather control and his
unsubstantiated claims for it represented a serious lapse in judgment. Thus his final,
major undertaking—his foray into weather control—deserves to be scrutinized in
light of the criteria developed in his own lectures on pathological science.

blowing Smoke

During World War II, General Electric held contracts with the National Defense
Research Council, the office of Scientific Research and Development (oSRD),
the Chemical Warfare Service, and the U.S. Army Air Force for research on gas
mask filters, screening smokes, aircraft icing studies, precipitation static, and other
aspects of what came to be known as aerosol or “cloud” physics. In 1941, follow-
ing German successes in using a smoke generator to hide the battleship Bismarck
in the fjords of Norway, Langmuir asked his associate Schaefer to enlarge a small
smoke generator he had built under military contract for testing air filters for gas
masks. Using a mercury diffusion pump originally designed by Langmuir attached
to a pot of boiling oil, Schaefer proceeded to “smoke up the whole room,” getting
him into trouble with his laboratory neighbors and with the local fire department
when he tested it, without advance notice, on the laboratory roof. 6

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