Blondlot’s laboratory and concluded, as had other critics, that the reported changes in brightness that Blondlot used to argue for the reality of N rays were figments of Blondlot’s imagination and a result of his desire to validate the existence of N rays. N-ray experiments had to be carried out in a darkened laboratory so the changes in brightness due to the rays’ presence could be observed. This gave Wood an opportunity to make several observations that proved Blondlot’s judgments of brightness changes were a function of his beliefs, and not of the presence or absence of N rays. In one experiment, Wood was to block an N-ray source by inserting a sheet of lead between the source and a card with luminous paint on it. Blondlot, acting as observer, made judgments about the paint’s brightness and, therefore, about the presence or absence of N rays. Without telling Blondlot, Wood changed the experiment in one slight but vitally important way. He would indicate to Blondlot that the lead sheet was blocking the N-ray source when it really wasn’t, and vice versa. If N rays really existed, Blondlot’s judgments of the brightness of the luminous paint should be a function of whether the lead screen really was between the card and the N-ray source and should have had no relationship to whether or not he believed the sheet was blocking the source. In fact, Wood found that Blondlot’s judgments depended on whether he believed the screen to be present or not. For example, if he believed the screen was present (blocking N rays), but it wasn’t, he reported the paint to be less luminous. If he was told the screen was not present (allowing N rays to pass), but it really was, he reported the paint to be more luminous.
Similarly, in two other situations, Wood showed Blondlot’s subjective brightness judgments to be a function of his belief. Blondlot had claimed that an aluminum prism would produce a spectrum of N rays of different wavelengths, just as a glass prism produces a spectrum of visible light of different wavelengths. Wood found he could remove the aluminum prism from the path of the N rays without interfering with Blondlot’s ability to see the N-ray spectrum. Later, when Blondlot’s laboratory assistant became suspicious of Wood, Wood pretended to move the prism, while leaving it in place. This caused the assistant to report that the N-ray spectrum was not present. Finally, Wood performed a similar substitution in an experiment designed to show that N rays increased visual sensitivity in dim light. An N-ray source was placed near a subject’s eyes. The “subject of the experiment assured Wood that the hands of a clock, which were normally not clearly visible to him, became brighter and much more distinct” (Klotz 1980, p. 174) when the N-ray source was held near. Wood then replaced the N-ray source with a similarly shaped piece of wood, a substance that was not an N-ray source. Nonetheless, as long as the subject was unaware of the switch, he continued to report that objects were brighter and more distinct when the piece of wood, which he believed to be an N-ray source, was close to his eyes.
Wood’s report, published in the British journal Nature in 1904 (reprinted with a short commentary by Hines 1996), along with the failures of other laboratories to verify the existence of N rays, led to the conclusion that N rays do not exist. No further papers appeared on the topic after about 1907. Only Blondlot, convinced until the end that N rays were real, pursued his research on the topic until he died in 1930.
At the height of the debate over the existence of N rays, proponents adopted a nonfalsifiable hypothesis to account for critics’ inability to observe the rays: The critics’ eyes weren’t sensitive enough. When Wood initially told Blondlot that he couldn’t see any brightness difference on a screen when the rays were or were not present, he was told “that was because my eyes were not sensitive enough, so that proved nothing” (Seabrook 1941, p. 238). Years later, one of the early proponents of N-rays made a similar point: “If an observer (who is not convinced) sees nothing, you conclude that he does not have sensitive eyes” (Becquerel 1934, cited in Nye 1980, p. 153).
It is vital to note that Blondlot and the other proponents of N rays were not lying when they reported that they saw a brighter spark or luminous screen when they believed that N rays were present. Sparks and luminous screens vary in brightness from moment to moment for several reasons. Random changes in brightness that confirm an observer’s belief are much more likely to be noted than those that go against the belief. Numerous similar instances where a belief can profoundly change the way in which someone perceives a stimulus will be noted throughout this book.
The case of N rays also illustrates how science handles the burden of proof. (Compare this to the discussion of academic studies of ESP in chapter 4.) Assume that someone wished to argue, today, that N rays really do exist. To bolster the case, he goes back to the physics journals of 1903–1907 and assembles all the papers that argued that N rays are real. The proponent then challenges the skeptic to explain in detail what was wrong in each of the published papers favorable to the existence of N rays. Could the skeptic meet this challenge? Certainly not—there is simply not sufficient detail in the papers to pinpoint precisely what led the author to mistakenly conclude that N rays existed.
Does the fact that the skeptic cannot pinpoint the methodological errors in each and every experiment supporting the existence of N rays mean that the existence of the rays should be accepted? Of course not. The general explanation for the favorable results—such as reliance on subjective measures—along with the failure of well-designed studies to validate the existence of N rays is more than enough to justify the conclusion that N rays do not exist. Unlike proponents of pseudoscientific claims, science places the burden of proof on the individuals who make extraordinary claims. Blondlot and his colleagues failed to provide valid evidence for the existence of N rays.
Polywater, initially known as anomalous water, was “discovered” in the early 1960s by a Russian scientist named Nikdlai Fedyakin, working at a laboratory about one hundred miles from Moscow. This form of water had several extremely strange qualities. It boiled at a temperature well above water’s normal boiling point and froze at a point well below water’s normal freezing point. Further, polywater was said to be a more stable form of the H2O molecule. This led to at least one scientist making the dire prediction that, if even the smallest amount of polywater was allowed to contaminate natural water supplies, natural water molecules would spontaneously change into the more stable polywater form, thus ending all life on earth due to the radically different characteristics of polywater. (Readers familiar with the work of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. will recognize at once the similarity between polywater and the mythical substance “ice nine” created in Vonnegut’s story “Cat’s Cradle.”)
Russian research on polywater quickly moved from the provinces to a prestigious laboratory in Moscow. At first polywater attracted little attention in Western scientific circles. When it did, however, there was an explosion of papers on the topic in numerous scientific journals. Between 1962 and 1975 several hundred papers on polywater appeared.
For various technical reasons, polywater could be produced only in minute quantities inside sealed glass tubes with equally minute diameters. The debate over the existence of polywater turned on one crucial point— whether the water produced in these tubes was pure H2O, or whether it was impure, the impurities leaching out of the glass and changing the properties of the pure water. Proponents of polywater claimed they had produced pure polywater, with no impurities. That is, the substance was pure H2O in a new and different molecular configuration. Skeptics who tried to produce polywater in their laboratories consistently ended up with nothing more than impure water of the normal molecular configuration. The proponents responded that the reason the skeptics couldn’t produce true polywater was that they hadn’t learned how to do it just right. While such a rejoinder was appropriate at first, it quickly became little more than a nonfalsifiable hypothesis that proponents used to explain away every failure by the skeptics to produce “true” polywater.
As the 1960s faded into the 1970s, it became clear that polywater did not exist and claims for its reality were, in fact, based on impure water, as the skeptics had argued from the first. By the mid-1970s polywater was a dead issue.
The similarities between the N-ray and polywater episodes are instructive. One striking similarity was the use by proponents of both phenomena of nonfalsifiable hypotheses in the defense of their claims. Thus, such techniques for defending untenable claims are not limited to pseudosciences and the paranormal. They appear in legitimate science in those—happily rather rare—situations where commitment to the reality of a certain phenomenon is stronger than the data on which that commitment is based. The much more common use of nonfalsifiable hypotheses in pseudosciences and the paranormal is due simply to the near-total lack of real phenomena in these areas to begin with.
As was the case with N rays, it would probably be impossible to pinpoint the exact procedural errors made in every experiment that seemed to produce evidence of polywater. We know, of course, the general nature of the errors made, but that is different from an exact explanation for every case on record. However, as in the case of N rays (and as will be noted again in the chapters on UFOs and ESP), it is not necessary for the skeptic to explain away every seemingly positive instance of a claimed phenomenon before rejecting the phenomenon. In the polywater case, as well as in the case of N rays, the total failure of careful experimentation to turn up evidence for
