13 Things That Don't Make Sense (8 page)

In 1972 Francis Perrin of the French atomic energy commission was examining samples of ore from a uranium mine in Oklo. At
the time, France was constructing a host of new electricity-generating nuclear reactors to be powered by Gabon’s bountiful
uranium resources. The next task on the to-do list was deciding what to do with all the nuclear waste they would produce.
That meant cataloging the waste to decide how radioactive it was and how it needed to be managed. During this work, Perrin
couldn’t help but notice that the Oklo ore samples looked exactly like nuclear waste.

Atoms of uranium come in several different weights, or isotopes. Perrin noticed that the Oklo samples contained twice as much
of one isotope, uranium-235, as would normally be expected. It took a few calculations, some careful analysis of the region’s
geology, and a great deal of lateral thinking, but eventually Perrin declared—to almost universal derision—that Oklo had once
been the site of a natural nuclear reactor. Two billion years ago, a combination of heat and groundwater movement had provided
the perfect conditions for fission reactions to take place underground.

At the time, the French nuclear authorities thought some kind of contamination was more likely. Since then, however, more
natural reactors have been found in the Oklo region, and Perrin’s finding is now universally accepted.

To science, the discovery is a goldmine. Two billion years ago, the constant we call alpha was presiding over the precise
mechanics of the nuclear reactions that took place in the ground at Oklo. If you want to know whether alpha really is constant,
Oklo provides the best test samples this side of Alpha Centauri.

The physicist Freeman Dyson was one of the first to jump on Perrin’s find. Dyson, who has the reputation of being something
of a rebel, had already been wondering, like Dirac, whether constants and laws were really so unchanging. The Oklo reactor
gave him a chance to find out. He enlisted the help of the French nuclear physicist Thibault Damour and set about the analysis.
Their conclusion was probably disappointing to Dyson: if alpha had changed at all, it was by no more than a billionth of its
present value.

When Webb’s results came out, Dyson and Damour’s Oklo data allowed most scientists to ignore him; Oklo contradicted Webb’s
findings and was much more reliable than an investigation of ancient starlight. Eventually, though, as Webb’s findings refused
to go away, a few people did start to look more closely at what Dyson and Damour had done—and they began to find flaws. There
was no firm rebuttal of the Oklo evidence until 2004. But when it came, it was more than a rebuttal. It came down firmly in
support of a varying alpha.

Steve Lamoreaux and Justin Torgerson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the site of the United States’ Manhattan
Project, used what Lamoreaux calls “more realistic” estimates of the energies involved in the various nuclear processes that
would have occurred. And that’s not just Lamoreaux’s take; Damour has concurred that these calculations should take us closer
to the truth. The conclusion? Alpha has decreased by more than forty-five parts in a billion since the Oklo reactor burned
itself out.

The fact that alpha has decreased since Oklo, while increasing since the starlight passed through gas clouds 12 billion years
ago, might seem contradictory. But, as the evidence for varying constants builds up, it seems that this disparity may be,
in fact, part of a cosmic conspiracy.

IN
1935 the British astronomer Arthur Eddington published a manuscript titled
New Pathways in Science
. In it, he described what he called the four “ultimate constants” of nature. One was a number he had worked out during a
transatlantic boat crossing: the number of protons in the universe. Another was alpha—or rather its inverse: 1 divided by
alpha. The third was the ratio of the gravitational and electromagnetic forces that pull an electron toward a proton. The
fourth was even simpler: the ratio of the proton’s mass to the electron’s mass.

The fact that he could use these four numbers—and these four alone—to describe the characteristics of the entire universe
impressed Eddington; physics must be doing pretty well, he thought. But, being a physicist and a close friend of Albert Einstein,
who was trying to produce a single “unifying” theory of physics at the time, Eddington was also frustrated by the fact that
there wasn’t just one number. “Our present recognition of four constants instead of one merely indicates the amount of unification
theory which still remains to be accomplished,” he wrote. It would probably bug him more to know, as we do now, that at least
two of those “constants” appear to be inconstant.

The second inconstant constant revealed itself in light captured by the telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in
Chile. In 2006 a team of physicists published a paper declaring that the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass, usually
referred to as
mu
, was bigger in the distant past. This time, the shift was registered by looking at how the light changed as it passed through
clouds of hydrogen gas. Hydrogen is composed of a proton and an electron, and the way it absorbs and reemits the light gave
the researchers a value for mu. The wrong value.

As with alpha, this is a very distant past and a very small change: mu was bigger by 0.002 percent about 12 billion years
ago. It was a significant enough result to be published in the prestigious journal
Physical Review Letters
, however.

It is significant because the electron and the proton mass are central to determining the strength of the “strong” force that
holds atomic nuclei together. The strong force also binds quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons. Since alpha is
linked to the “weak” force that governs radioactive decay and the electromagnetic force that dictates the power of electrical
and magnetic interactions, that’s three out of the four fundamental forces of physics (the other is gravity) that seem slightly
wobbly.

How do we deal with this? Perhaps Webb has been living in Australia too long, but he has a simple answer: don’t sweat it.
While many—if not most—physicists don’t react to observational evidence of varying constants because it is simply too frightening,
Webb has a very different, though no less pragmatic, stance. Alpha was only declared a constant in 1938, he points out. Mu
was declared to be constant in 1953. It’s not even as if we know anything about
why
these constants have the values they do—and that includes the gravitational constant. No one can explain them; there is no
deep theory that matches the constants to their experimentally determined values. And so there really doesn’t seem to be a
good reason to fiercely cling to the notion they
must
be constant. In 2003, in the magazine
Physics World
, Webb put the case for coolness like this.

When we refer to the laws of nature, what we are really talking about is a particular set of ideas that are striking in their
simplicity, that appear to be universal and have been verified by experiment. It is thus human beings who declare that a scientific
theory is a law of nature and human beings are quite often wrong.

So, if we’re not to panic, what conclusions do we draw? Webb and Barrow have thought long and hard about this. Maybe, they
suggest, the varying constants are telling us something. The fact that alpha seems to vary in different ways—smaller than
now 12 billion years ago, but bigger than now a couple of billion years ago—suggests that the constants (and maybe the laws)
could vary in both time and space. Perhaps, were we to wander through the vastness of the universe, we would come across different
sets of constants and different sets of laws—parochial cosmic by-laws—wherever we went. It is a short step from there to suggesting
that the laws are not fixed in time either. Maybe the laws of physics changed as the universe evolved?

This is not an entirely new idea. John Webb has been labeled incompetent or (more often) studiously ignored by his detractors,
but all he has really done is uncover an anomaly that backs up the suggestions of one of the world’s most respected physicists.
Thirty years ago, the physicist John Wheeler asked why we assume the laws are unchanging. The strength
of the forces of nature might depend on cosmic conditions, he suggested, making them different in the hot, dense plasma of
the birth of the universe than they are in today’s old, cold cosmos. Might the laws not change their character as the universe
cools down, flowing then congealing like a metaphysical molten lava? It is a very loosely formed idea—Wheeler in fact called
it “an idea for an idea”—but it raises the possibility that our attempts to trace cosmic history, from the big bang through
the production of the first elements and stars, might be hugely oversimplified.

Richard Feynman, too, had his doubts about our grasp of the laws of physics. In 1985, twenty years after he, Julian Schwinger,
and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga won a Nobel Prize for the development of QED, Feynman published a slim book on the theory. In the
final chapter, titled “Loose Ends,” he makes an honest admission that seems somewhat surprising given the theory’s success
and acceptance. “We do not have a good mathematical way to describe the theory of quantum electrodynamics,” he says.

To give the quote some context, Feynman is pointing out that the coupling between light and matter depends on inserting a
couple of numbers that are found through “hocus-pocus” rather than experiment. What’s more, he says, you then also have to
insert what he calls “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics, a magic number that comes to us with no understanding
by man.” He is talking about alpha, of course. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics in existence,
QED still has Feynman cursing—and mostly because of alpha. “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty
years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.”

By the time Schwinger died, he had more reason than most to worry about alpha: an investigation into QED, the theory that
invokes alpha, had all but scuttled his career. The investigation in question was carried out by two chemists: Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleischmann. They are now almost universally derided as frauds, cranks, or—at best—incompetents, and Schwinger’s
resolute support for their work destroyed his hard-won credibility. For more than a decade, the fate of Pons, Fleischmann,
and Schwinger has stood as a warning to others. Whatever the benefits and the insights it might bring—and they are, potentially,
legion—scientists investigate our next anomaly, known as cold fusion, at their own risk.

4

COLD FUSION

Nuclear energy without the drama

SALT LAKE CITY—Two scientists have successfully created a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature in a chemistry
laboratory at the University of Utah. The breakthrough means the world may someday rely on fusion for a clean, virtually inexhaustible
source of energy.

T
hat was how a press release, issued on March 23, 1989, by the University of Utah, launched the end of Martin Fleischmann’s
career. Fleischmann remembers his work’s motivation very differently. “I had no intention of saving the world,” he says. “No
intention whatsoever!”

Fleischmann speaks with a vaguely eastern European accent—he was born in Czechoslovakia—but he doesn’t speak a great deal.
Ask him a question, and he is quite capable of sitting, musing on it, for a full minute or more. Perhaps he has learned caution
since that day.

He has a lot of regrets about that press release, and the press conference that followed it, but the one that he admits first
is that he never told the truth. “I never told people I was only interested in understanding quantum electrodynamics,” he
says.

It was the summer of 2007 when I met Fleischmann for the first time. Just coming face-to-face with this man, now a curiosity
in the history of science, was a coup. His partner in the Utah experiment, Stanley Pons, lives in the south of France and
sees no one—especially not journalists. Fleischmann, now in his eighties, is still fairly guarded about the outside world,
and my visit only came about through a network of contacts. I am in good company, though. In the months after the March 1989
announcement, the Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger also tried and failed to set up a meeting with Pons and Fleischmann. In
exasperation, he even sent a plea for a rendezvous in a letter to the
Los Angeles Times
. Eventually, a friend managed to set things up, and Schwinger got to go to Salt Lake City, where the three physicists sat
and talked at length about the limits of the theory that had won Schwinger his Nobel Prize.

Fleischmann was also a visitor to Salt Lake City; Stanley Pons was the Utah resident, and it was in his lab that the room-temperature
fusion—now infamous as
cold fusion
—experiments had taken place. Together, Fleischmann and Pons had plowed about $100,000 of their own money into the experiments,
but they had hit a brick wall. They needed another $600,000 to progress. They wrote a grant application, in which they mentioned
how an improved understanding of the processes of nuclear physics—in particular, how nuclear energy might be released in room-temperature
reactions—might allow you to create a new source of power. Put simply, you could get more power out than you put in, as with
an atom bomb, but with a lot less drama. It was this that the university seized upon when it strong-armed Pons and Fleischmann
into announcing their results at a press conference: the university’s research was going to save the planet. Fleischmann was
mortified, but—to his enduring regret—played along. His complicity cost him his reputation and his career. For a couple of
weeks, the world went mad for the story. Then the whole thing disappeared in a puff of scandal, partly because no one could
replicate their results, but mostly because the results they claimed made no sense.

Nuclear fusion is real enough. Squash two atoms close enough together, and their nuclei join, or fuse, creating one heavy
atom and releasing energy. This is the source of life on Earth: the Sun is powered by fusion. In the Sun, hydrogen atoms are
squashed together by the enormous gravitational pressure to make a single atom of helium. This releases fistfuls of energy;
small wonder, then, that scientists have long dreamed of creating controlled nuclear fusion on Earth.

To make sunshine on Earth, the idea is usually to squash together “heavy” hydrogen atoms. Normally, hydrogen has no neutrons
in its nucleus, but some hydrogen atoms contain one neutron (deuterium) or even two (tritium), making them heavier. These
heavy hydrogen atoms are better for fusion than normal hydrogen because they will fuse at a lower temperature and pressure.
In the Sun, fusion reactions take place at 10 to 15 million degrees and at pressures one hundred times the pressure in the
deepest part of the ocean. On Earth, both the temperature and pressure conditions—which are necessary to overcome the electrical
repulsion of the positively charged nuclei—are enormously hard to achieve. Any help, by using heavy hydrogen, for instance,
is most welcome.

It’s especially welcome since deuterium and tritium are easily available in seawater. In theory, there’s enough energy in
the oceans to meet all our needs. The reality is not quite so straightforward, however; researchers have been trying to perform
controlled fusion reactions for a few decades. It’s almost a running joke, in fact: whenever you ask about progress, the project
is always a few decades from success. It’s not clear we’ll ever be able to create the temperature and pressure conditions
of the Sun on Earth.

And that’s what makes Pons and Fleischmann’s claims so extraordinary. They implied that all the decades of effort and the
millions of dollars of research money were perhaps a waste of time, that you could create fusion reactions and release nuclear
energy at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure—and in nothing more complex than a laboratory beaker.

Pons and Fleischmann’s equipment was simple, to say the least. Their beaker contained heavy water, where each oxygen molecule
was bound to two deuterium atoms rather than two simple hydrogen atoms. Into this they put one end of a rod made of palladium
metal. The other end of the rod was hooked up to one side of a battery. The battery’s other terminal was linked to a coil
of platinum wire that spiraled around the inner wall of the beaker.

The setup meant that current from the battery traveled along the platinum wire, through the heavy water, and into the palladium
rod. Pons and Fleischmann claimed that this resulted in deuterium atoms being packed into the spaces between the palladium
atoms in the rod—and packed so tightly that they began to fuse, liberating energy.

The first part of the explanation makes some sense, at least. The Scottish chemist Thomas Graham was the first to note, in
1866, that palladium was able to absorb hydrogen gas. In fact, it seems to have an unusual appetite for the stuff. At normal
temperatures and pressures, palladium can absorb nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen. But would a palladium rod
really absorb so much hydrogen that the atoms would begin to fuse?

Pons and Fleischmann claimed this because, they said, the experiment produced an anomalous amount of heat. The temperature
of the water in the beaker rose far above anything explicable by the power coming from the battery. Energy was coming from
somewhere, and the only possibility was the fusion of deuterium atoms.

When the pair first made these claims, there was a frantic race to replicate their results. The U.S. Department of Energy
convened a panel of topflight scientists—the Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB)—to judge the outcome. In November of 1989,
the panel brought its verdict. “Some laboratories support the Utah claims of excess heat production, usually for intermittent
periods, but most report negative results,” the report said. The panel concluded that the experimental results on excess heat
“do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion
. . . the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive.” As a result,
the panel “recommended against the establishment of special programs or research centers to develop cold fusion.” The most
positive thing the panel had to say was that “some observations attributed to cold fusion are not yet invalidated.” As a result,
it was “sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative experiments within the present funding system.”
With most scientists baying for Pons’s and Fleischmann’s blood, it was never going to happen; people weren’t even going to
risk asking for money. As the writer Bennett Daviss put it, cold fusion was “as respectable in science as pornography in church.”

There was one place where cold fusion wasn’t thought of quite so poorly, though: the laboratories of the U.S. Navy’s Office
of Naval Research. Martin Fleischmann was a consultant for the navy, and plenty of the navy’s researchers had published papers
with him and were investigating their own lines of attack on the idea of low-temperature nuclear reactions. They knew very
well that Fleischmann was no flake. Three years earlier, he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society, the British academy
of science that honors the most eminent scientific minds in Britain and the Commonwealth. He had published hundreds of peer-reviewed
papers and had a reputation as one of the world’s best electrochemists. When the Pons and Fleischmann furor broke, U.S. Navy
researchers were asked by their superiors if anyone was working on something like it. Dozens of people put their hands up.
And they were allowed to keep going.

It was kept on the down-low; the words
cold fusion
were nowhere to be found on the navy’s budget sheets. The money came out of “miscellaneous” expenses and was marked up as
supporting research into “anomalous effects in deuterated systems.” Nonetheless, there was room for the navy’s chemists to
carry out their own investigations. Look back to the November 1989 report by the U.S. Energy Research Advisory Board, for
example, and you’ll find a contribution from Melvin Miles.

Miles’s story is almost a microcosm of the cold fusion story. He is now retired from the navy, but in 1989 he was working
in the laboratories of the Naval Air Warfare Center at China Lake in California. The author of a hundred or so peer-reviewed
papers, Miles was no stranger to experimental rigor and figured he could test the cold fusion claims as well as anyone else.
It was a decision that eventually brought his career to a humiliating end. It was a decision that eventually brought his career
to a humiliating end.

Miles’s paper that was cited in the ERAB report is his take on a very straightforward piece of experimental science. Miles
found a piece of palladium in his lab, which he dutifully soaked in deuterium for a week. The idea was that the palladium
would become “loaded” with deuterium. Then he put the sliver of metal into an electrochemical cell and turned on the juice.
Nothing happened. No strange heating effects, no evidence of nuclear reactions. Nothing. That’s what Miles reported, adding
his own research findings to the growing pile of evidence against Pons and Fleischmann.

He probably would have walked away then, but some of his colleagues—people he respected—were still reporting occasional flashes
of excess heat in their experiments. So Miles tried again. From March through August 1989, there was no change in the outcome.
Then Fleischmann sent him a recommendation. Fleischmann’s palladium samples were “Johnson Matthey Material A.” Miles sent
for some and tried them out. He published the results in the
Journal of Electro-Analytical Chemistry
in December 1990. In eight experiments, the new palladium samples produced somewhere between 30 and 50 percent more energy
than he put in.

The paper conveys no sense of the excitement it ought to have generated. No media picked it up, but Miles was reporting, essentially,
that he had repeated Pons and Fleischmann’s experiments, gaining similar results. Not that his cautious reporting was enough
to save his career.

Until 1996, Miles was relatively safe. His boss at the Office of Naval Research, Robert Nowak, was a chemist who allocated
the cold fusion program a modest budget and defended it in the face of threats and mutterings from skeptics who didn’t like
federal funding to fall into the hands of cold fusioneers. Nowak also defended it in the face of failure: from 1992 to 1994
Miles never managed to repeat his generation of excess heat. The navy metallurgist supplying his palladium alloy electrodes
used up the next two years—and all the manager’s goodwill and patience—getting the recipe right. By the time he did get it
right, producing electrodes that gave Miles a consistent 30 to 40 percent extra energy gain, the cold fusion budget had been
canceled.

Most of the cold fusioneers managed to get work on other projects, but not Melvin Miles. Nowak left for a job at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, and his successor told Miles that he was effectively unemployable. Everything had to be
paid for, including Miles’s time, and in the new climate no one wanted to buy the time of a researcher who had sullied himself
with cold fusion research. The hundreds of peer-reviewed papers with Miles’s name on them meant nothing. He was reassigned
to a job as a clerk in the stockroom. Thanks to his cold fusion research, Miles ended his naval research career taking boxes
down from shelves. The lesson? Involvement with cold fusion is a surefire way to blot your scientific copybook. It even happened
to a Nobel laureate.

JULIAN
Schwinger died in July 1994 from pancreatic cancer. Though it doesn’t mention his cold fusion work explicitly, Schwinger’s
obituary in the journal
Nature
talks of a “bitter-sweet quality to the later part of his life.” Noting that Schwinger refused to follow the newer directions
and fashions in theoretical physics—they were “too speculative, inadequately linked to experiment”—he “became increasingly
isolated and, to a degree, estranged from the world community of physicists.”

Schwinger evidently saw the bitter more than the sweet. The reaction from his peers to his interest in cold fusion was mostly
one of contempt. In 1991, three years before his death, he wrote, “The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced
it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial
reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.”