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Gustave Le Bon (May 7, 1841 - December 13, 1931) was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behaviour and crowd psychology. His work on crowd psychology became important in the first half of the twentieth century when it was used by media researchers such as Hadly Cantril and Blumer to describe the reactions of subordinate groups to media. He also contributed to on-going debates in physics about the nature of matter and energy. His book The Evolution of Matter was very popular in France (going through twelve editions), and though some of its ideas — notably that all matter was inherently unstable and was constantly and slowly transforming into luminiferous ether — were taken up favorably by physicists of the day (including Henri Poincaré) though his specific formulations were not given much consideration. In 1896 he reported observing a new kind of radiation, which he termed "black light" (not the same thing as a black light today), though it was later discovered to not exist.
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