Fixing the Sky (27 page)

The rise of civilian and military aviation in the early decades of the twentieth century placed fog clearing at the center of the research-and-development agenda. The airplane provided a new tool and a new research platform, and its vulnerability to fog provided a new urgency. New theories of electrical influence, chemical affinity, and large-scale combustion were put to the test. Of the three case histories presented here, L. Francis Warren was the most speculative, and Wilder Bancroft ended up the biggest loser, in both credibility and financial terms; Henry Houghton's reputation as a careful researcher grew, even if his applications failed; and FIDO actually worked and may even have helped the British war effort, but at an immense cost that rendered it impractical after the war when the question of national survival was no longer at issue.

Cloud physics and chemistry got its start in this era, as did serious attempts to make smoke screens and dissipate clouds. So too did air-conditioning, which grew by leaps and bounds from a novelty to a seeming necessity for larger and larger spaces. In common with later eras, weather control research before 1944 benefited from military patronage and the passing interest, if not support, of large corporations like General Electric. T. A. Blair's 1938 vision of dystopian climate control in the distant future now seems a spooky possibility in the not-so-distant future. These themes, mutatis mutandis, would reemerge in the work of an articulate, highly credentialed spokesperson: Irving Langmuir.

PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

—IRVING LANGMUIR, “PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IRVING
Langmuir (1881–1957), Nobel laureate in chemistry, quintessential industrial scientist, and associate director of research at the 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.
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Yet his work in weather control exemplified his own warnings about 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
Gurwitsch, who claimed to have revealed the secret lives of plants; the extrasensory perception (ESP) of the American parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, whose work convinced many people that they had this sixth sense; and, beginning in the 1940s, worldwide reports of flying saucers. Focusing his argument on basic research rather than on popularizations, Langmuir argued that in many pathological cases there was no dishonesty involved, but researchers were tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking, or threshold interactions. “Research” is defined as seeking to discover what you do not know. According to Langmuir, science conducted at the limits of observation or measurement—precisely where cutting-edge research is done—may become pathological if the participants make excessive claims for their results. Overly hopeful researchers studying phenomena close to the threshold of delectability may interpret minor variations or even random noise as meaningful patterns. By attributing causation to events that are barely detectable or poorly understood, they may convince themselves and co-workers of the reality of their “discovery.” If they persist, weaving theoretical justifications with claims of great accuracy and responding to criticisms with ad hoc excuses, they may cross the boundary into pathological science. If other researchers cannot reproduce any part of the alleged effect, or of the experiment fails repeatedly in the presence of an objective observer, the rules of good scientific practice are supposed to kick in, with support dropping off rapidly until nothing is left to salvage—according to Langmuir.
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Many scientists would say that they are working in exciting and rapidly changing fields, in which a breakthrough or named discovery could establish their careers or secure them adequate levels of funding. Otherwise, why bother? Under such conditions, external or social pressures may distort the scientific process and lead into the realm of pathology. Such pressures may include the rush to publish questionable or speculative results, to claim priority, or to avoid priority disputes; intervention of the press, the courts, or government regulators in the process; or competitions for prizes. The patentability and potential profitability of proprietary discoveries may also short-circuit the scientific process and result in the violation or circumvention of established standards of evidence. When things begin to go awry, investigators may suspect a conspiracy to discredit their results, which, depending on the personality of the leading figure, may be convincing to others.

Pathological science is by no means limited to esoteric physics experiments done in darkened rooms or at high temperatures and pressures where the subjectivity of the experimenter or malfunctioning equipment may be the source of the deception.
In fact, at the very same time Langmuir presented his seminar on pathological 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 of proof.
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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 incidence of this kind of ‘science' will increase at least linearly with the increase in scientific activity.”
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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 University 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 collapse: “From small beginnings there developed a tangled web of wishful thinking, scientific misjudgment, institutional lapses and human failings.”
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This is pathological 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.

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, following 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.
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A full demonstration for the military was held at dawn on June 24, 1942, at Vrooman's Nose, a 600-foot cliff that provided a panoramic view of an agricultural region in upstate New York known as the Schoharie Valley. Notables in attendance included Vannevar Bush and Alan Waterman of the OSRD, Vladimir K. Zworykin of RCA Research Labs (prominent in chapter 7), and top military officers. On cue, at sunrise, with drainage winds flowing down the valley, a tiny puff of smoke from a single Langmuir–Schaefer generator rose in the distance and quickly spread to fill the valley floor. The device worked by forcing 100 gallons of lubricating oil at a temperature of about 450°C (842°F) at supersonic speeds through a hot manifold. As the oil vapor hit the cold air, it formed a dense white cloud of tiny particles. Within minutes, the generator had belched out a persistent, thick smoke screen 1 mile wide, 10 miles long, and 1,000 feet deep, totally obscuring the valley. The army had its smoke screen, GE its contract, and Langmuir and Schaefer had taken their first steps in the new field of cloud physics. Since they had made an artificial cloud successfully, why not modify an existing one?
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In 1943, again under military patronage, Langmuir's research team shifted its attention to studies of electrical effects such as precipitation static, which interfered with radio communications during snowstorms. The Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire provided ideal conditions for their experiments and, serendipitously, led them into the study of the behavior of clouds containing water droplets as cold as–40°C (–40°F) (“quite a bit below freezing”). Such conditions represented the typical environment for clouds in the free atmosphere and provided insights into the nature of ice nuclei, ice deposition, and other aspects of cloud physics. “In the process,” according to an interview with Schaefer, “Langmuir and I became very much interested in the whole business of supercooled clouds, and whether you could modify them.” The military roots of weather control research should not be surprising, given the earlier history of army aviators using electrified sand and chemicals for cloud busting and the contemporaneous effort to clear fog in England using the FIDO system.

Langmuir and his team read the latest articles by meteorologists Alfred Wegener, Tor Bergeron, Walter Findeisen, and other European researchers on the initiation of ice-phase precipitation. Schaefer again took the lead, seeding supercooled clouds of water droplets with “dozens of different materials”: talc, carbon, graphite, volcanic dust, various smokes, and quartz crystals—following an idea attributed to Findeisen that the crystals might provide suitable cloud condensation nuclei (this “didn't work at all”).
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Yet Schaefer persisted in his “cut and try” methods, emulating Thomas Edison's search for a suitable lamp filament. Rather than theory, it was Schaefer's use of dry ice to cool his cloud chamber in the summer of 1947 that opened up a new chapter in the history of weather control.
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Others had tried this before.