
N-Rays: The Imaginary Radiation That Ruined Its ‘Discoverer’ (2014) - georgecmu
https://www.wired.com/2014/09/fantastically-wrong-n-rays/
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DoctorOetker
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...

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chopin
>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).

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qubex
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.

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DoctorOetker
I almost suspect the article of intentionally trolling the educated reader

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klodolph
> 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.

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Dylan16807
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)

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gattilorenz
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.

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userbinator
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.)

