Only a small part of scientific progress has resulted from planned search for specific objectives.
A much more important part has been made possible by the freedom of the individual to follow his own curiosity.
- Irving Langmuir
Medicine also disregards national boundaries.
- Irving Langmuir
Irving Langmuir (center)
with Marconi (right) at GE Lab in 1922
The scientist is motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for truth.
- Irving Langmuir
To me, extremely interesting that men, perfectly honest, enthusiastic over their work, can so completely fool themselves...
- Irving Langmuir
[There] are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are 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.
These are examples of pathological science.
These are things that attracted a great deal of attention, usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them, sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away.
- Irving Langmuir
Naming a State of Matter...
Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn to parents who encouraged him to closely observe nature and take meticulous notes...
At age 8, it was discovered that Irving had poor vision...
When his vision was 'corrected' he became even more fascinated by the details he saw.
His Ph.D. reseach used the Nernst glower, an electric light invented by Nernst.
Langmuir was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with surface chemistry.
In fact, the journal of the American Chemical Society is still called Langmuir in his honor...
But his work extended to physics as well...
He was the first to call ionized gas a "Plasma" because of its similarity to the behavior of ion rich blood plasma.
Electrostatic probes known as Langmuir probes are still the instruments used in laboratories and in space to measure plasmas.
Electricity in space cannot be seen from a disatance as can magnetic fields, and still today conventional models assume that there is no electricity in space, even though it is filled with plasma, a medium which carries electric current.
The idea of space as a vacuum is incorrect.
The opposite is true...
Even if all stable ions and neutral particles could be removed from a space, there would still be a fluctuating sea of ions coming into existence briefly.
This zero point energy is sometimes called a plenum, which means a 'fullness', the exact opposite of a vacuum...
The best vacuum ever produced in a laboratory still contains a much higher density of matter than interstellar space...
And even the so-called voids between galactic clusters are filled with a rarified plasma.
The amount of current carried across the vast cross sections of cosmic plasma are enough to account for the highly organized magnetic fields seen throughout the cosmos, and in the galaxies.
In this view, a galaxy has the electrical characteristics of a homopolar motor.
The electric currents charge the bright arms of the galaxy and rotate twice the rate of the movement of the stars, propelling the celestial bodies along...
The rotation profile of galaxies is identical to the rotation of plasmoids produced in the laboratory, when scaled up in time and space.
Plasma is cellular, and current through it organizes into twisted pairs of Birkeland currents.