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N-Rays: The Imaginary Radiation That Ruined Its ‘Discoverer’ (2014)

29 points by georgecmu 8y ago

klodolph 8y ago
> Be wary of men who forbid you from looking at something straight-on. The article obliquely mentions astronomy, but this is actually a well-understood fact: the center of the fovea has almost no rods. This makes it very sensitive to color and fine detail but less sensitive under dim lighting conditions. It is fairly easy to experience this yourself with a telescope—I have personally experienced it. Look directly at a star and it disappears, look slightly away and it appears again.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Another subtle but useful optical effect, one that you can't properly look at, is Haidinger's brush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush
gattilorenz 8y ago
I can mildly recommend "Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World" by Paul Collins, that includes a chapter on N rays, and is mentioned in this article. I don't love Collin's writing style, but the stories are as interesting and fascinating as this one.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
Of course I believe N-rays are nonsense, but I can't help but notice similarities between these "N-Rays" and infrared radiation (perhaps thermal, perhaps near IR). Excited phosphors can be stimulated to de-excite with IR (increasing - temporarily! - the light intensity the phosphor emits. The sun emits IR of course. Water absorbs infrared. And being ~100% wrong in the blind controlled experiment indicates he is detecting the exact opposite, or misunderstood his task in the experiment. If it were random it would have been 50%... We are blindly believing Wood on his word he took out the prism for example. Obviously N-rays don't exist though. Something else is the article seems to concede that he did discover the wave nature of X-rays by deflecting them with a "charged electric field", which I assure you is total nonsense...
- chopin 8y ago
  >Something else is the article seems to concede that he did discover the wave nature of X-rays by deflecting them with a "charged electric field", which I assure you is total nonsense... That left me puzzled as well (IAAP).
  - qubex 8y ago
    I can’t for the world of me figure out how that is supposed to work! It runs counter to all my intuition regarding electromagnetism.
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      I almost suspect the article of intentionally trolling the educated reader
userbinator 8y ago
The first image in the article references this obsolete lighting technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nernst_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nernst_lamp (which N-rays were not named after, as I had initially assumed upon seeing that image.)

29 points by georgecmu 8y ago

> Be wary of men who forbid you from looking at something straight-on. The article obliquely mentions astronomy, but this is actually a well-understood fact: the center of the fovea has almost no rods. This makes it very sensitive to color and fine detail but less sensitive under dim lighting conditions. It is fairly easy to experience this yourself with a telescope—I have personally experienced it. Look directly at a star and it disappears, look slightly away and it appears again.

Dylan16807 8y ago
Another subtle but useful optical effect, one that you can't properly look at, is Haidinger's brush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush

gattilorenz 8y ago

I can mildly recommend "Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World" by Paul Collins, that includes a chapter on N rays, and is mentioned in this article. I don't love Collin's writing style, but the stories are as interesting and fascinating as this one.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

Of course I believe N-rays are nonsense, but I can't help but notice similarities between these "N-Rays" and infrared radiation (perhaps thermal, perhaps near IR). Excited phosphors can be stimulated to de-excite with IR (increasing - temporarily! - the light intensity the phosphor emits. The sun emits IR of course. Water absorbs infrared. And being ~100% wrong in the blind controlled experiment indicates he is detecting the exact opposite, or misunderstood his task in the experiment. If it were random it would have been 50%... We are blindly believing Wood on his word he took out the prism for example. Obviously N-rays don't exist though. Something else is the article seems to concede that he did discover the wave nature of X-rays by deflecting them with a "charged electric field", which I assure you is total nonsense...

chopin 8y ago
>Something else is the article seems to concede that he did discover the wave nature of X-rays by deflecting them with a "charged electric field", which I assure you is total nonsense... That left me puzzled as well (IAAP).
- qubex 8y ago
  I can’t for the world of me figure out how that is supposed to work! It runs counter to all my intuition regarding electromagnetism.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    I almost suspect the article of intentionally trolling the educated reader

userbinator 8y ago

The first image in the article references this obsolete lighting technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nernst_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nernst_lamp (which N-rays were not named after, as I had initially assumed upon seeing that image.)