Sun in a Bottle (21 page)

On the other side, anti-cold-fusion physicists felt that they were simply trying to investigate a very important scientific claim; after all, the whole scientific method relies on the vigilance of the scientific community. Even skeptical fusion scientists, such as Richard Garwin, who helped turn the Teller-Ulam design into a testable bomb, investigated the Pons and Fleischmann claims with an open mind. “Within the next few weeks, experiments will surely show whether cold fusion is taking place; if so it will teach us much besides humility,” he wrote in April 1989, even though he himself “bet against its confirmation.” But the lack of details from Pons and Fleischmann was frustrating physicists who were trying to confirm the cold-fusion experiments using data gleaned from television broadcasts and newspaper photographs.

Throughout April, the pro-cold-fusion groups had the momentum. Though MIT researchers had reported that they were unable to replicate the experiments in mid-April, there were the confirmatory results on the other side: Jones, Georgia Tech’s neutrons, and Texas A&M’s heat. When Pons spoke at a hastily cobbled-together special session at the American Chemical Society meeting on April 12, the mood was enthusiastic. The crowd was extremely sympathetic, if for no other reason than the hope that fellowchemists would succeed where physicists had failed. Physicists had spent years trying to harness the power of fusion, noted the American Chemical Society’s president in his introduction to Pons’s presentation. “Now it appears that chemists may have come to the rescue,” he said, triggering applause and laughter. But Pons’s presentation generated serious doubts in the audience. Most troubling was when he fielded questions about his control experiments.

If Pons and Fleischmann were actually seeing fusion in a test tube, they should have been able to show that the effect was not due to a quirk in their apparatus. To do this, they needed to run a control experiment—one that was almost identical to the fusion cell, but subtly different in a way that would prevent fusion from occurring. Only then could they prove that fusion was really responsible for the excess heat and other effects they were seeing. In the Pons and Fleischmann case, the obvious control experiment was to run an identical experiment with ordinary water rather than heavy, deuterium-laden water. If deuterium-deuterium fusion was responsible for the excess heat, getting rid of the deuterium and replacing it with ordinary hydrogen should end the fusion and turn the heating off. They then could be assured that the heat had something to do with the deuterium in the beaker. Doing this was absolutely necessary if Pons and Fleischmann were to prove to other scientists that they were not deluding themselves.

Indeed, this sort of control experiment is what budding scientists are taught to do in freshman science classes, and everybody expected it from such established scientists as Pons and Fleischmann—not to have run one would seem absurd. But when questioned about why Pons had not published any control experiments, his reply was cryptic. “We do not get the total blank experiment that we expected,” he said. Was he really implying that fusion occurred in the absence of deuterium? This seemed ridiculous even if you accepted that a miracle occurred inside the palladium cell.

At the very least, the scientific community wanted to see the results of those control experiments, but neither the
Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry
paper nor the one that Pons and Fleischmann submitted to
Nature
had any sign of such a control. “How is this astounding oversight to be explained to students. . . . And how should the neglect be explained to the world at large?” asked John Maddox, the editor of
Nature
. This was poor science at best, although it was beginning to look much worse than that.

After
Nature
received the twin manuscripts from Pons and Fleischmann and Jones, the journal sent them out for peer review. The reviewers made their suggestions for changes and additional work, and these were sent back to the authors. Jones complied with the reviewers’ requests, but Pons and Fleischmann refused to do so, claiming they were too busy with other “urgent work.” Though
Nature
emphasized that this did not make the Pons-Fleischmann paper any less believable than Jones’s, it was still a deep blow to the team’s credibility. Many physicists were beginning to smell a rat, and the rhetoric grew more heated.

The press ratcheted up the rhetoric, too. The
Wall Street Journal
had been enthusiastic about cold fusion since the very beginning. Its reporter, Jerry Bishop, had written a page-1 story covering the Pons and Fleischmann press conference in Utah, and the
Journal
had become the go-to place for optimistic news about cold-fusion developments. When criticism of Pons and Fleischmann began to bubble through the press, especially the liberal press, the
Journal
struck back. In April, the
New Republic
wrote a piece blasting the scientists for releasing the experimental results “in a way that maximized publicity but defied the conventions that are supposed to ensure the reliability of scientific information.” The
Wall Street Journal
replied with a caustic editorial linking criticism of cold fusion with other complaints of East Coast liberals: “The pace of scientific advance is sometimes hard to discern amid the unending wail about trade deficits, food chemicals, the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, animal rights or political ethics,” it declared. “Even within the scientific enterprise, the creative impulse of a Fleischmann and Pons must contend today with what might be called ‘Academy mentality.’”

The clash between the pro-cold-fusion and anti-cold-fusion camps was becoming an ugly fight. It was also getting more confused by the minute.

The day after Pons’s speech at the American Chemical Society, the researchers at Georgia Tech, who had provided evidence in favor of cold fusion, recanted. They weren’t seeing neutrons after all. They had made an embarrassing mistake: their detector had been picking up temperature fluctuations rather than neutrons. The Texas A&M scientists also backed off their claims a bit; the amount of excess heat they were seeing had dropped dramatically. Excess heat was still evidence in favor of cold fusion, but the change undermined confidence in the A&M results. Then there was the bizarre claim that Pons and Fleischmann had found helium in their palladium electrodes. In mid-April, the Utah chemists told the press—again, without a formal paper supporting their claims—that their cells were producing helium. But they were claiming the production of helium-4, not helium-3.

If deuterium-deuterium fusion is happening, it is producing helium-3 at a quick rate. Since the branch of the reaction

 

happens roughly half the time, one helium-3 should be produced for every two fusions that occur. Helium-3, not helium-4. However, once in a long while—once in about ten million fusions—an unusual reaction does occur. Two deuterium nuclei stick together, producing a helium-4 that is quivering with energy. Usually, the helium-4 can’t hold together; either a neutron or a proton pops off. Rarely, though, the helium-4 sheds the excess energy in another way: it emits an enormously energetic gamma ray (with about 24 MeV), and the helium-4 nucleus survives. So the reaction

 

does exist. It is just very rare.

Pons and Fleischmann, backed by the theoretical calculations of two other Utah chemists, were suggesting that this third, rare branch of the deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction had somehow become dominant, suppressing not only the branch that produced tritium but also the branch that produced neutrons. It would explain why the tritium and neutron observations reported thus far were so iffy, and why nobody was spotting helium-3. But physicists weren’t buying it. Not only would suppressing the ordinary mechanisms of deuterium-deuterium fusion in favor of this rare branch require a miracle of sorts (nothing like this had been theorized, much less been seen before), but also scientists could point to numerous cases of researchers’ being fooled by helium-4 in the atmosphere. In fact, there was a notorious case from the 1920s when two German researchers, Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters, convinced themselves that a palladium catalyst was turning hydrogen into helium. Instead, the helium they were detecting was contamination from the atmosphere. The case was so similar to the Pons-Fleischmann episode (down to the type of metal used by the experimenters) that it seemed ridiculous for Pons and Fleischmann to rely heavily on helium-4 production as support for their “discovery.”

Yet even as the criticism mounted, the researchers betrayed little doubt about their work. On April 26, Pons and Fleischmann, along with Chase Peterson, Steven Jones, and other cold-fusion backers, testified in front of a congressional committee. At stake was a bid to get the federal government to chip in $25 million to cold-fusion research. Pons said he and Fleischmann were “sure as sure can be” that they had achieved fusion, and Fleischmann said he had confirmation of their results from other groups. Even though an MIT physicist urged caution, dubbing the cold-fusion fiasco as “The Case of the Missing Controls,” the warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. Or no ears. The physicist Robert Park noted that “By the time the hearings got around to the skeptics, only two committee members remained, the television cameras were gone.”

The physics community was in an uproar. Pons and Fleischmann were too busy to revise their paper for
Nature
, too busy to respond to requests for clarification and information from skeptics, too busy to attend the upcoming American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Baltimore, but not too busy to hype their claims to Congress in hopes of grabbing $25 million of federal pork. The researchers were making ever more bizarre claims (such as the helium-4 detection) and getting increasingly defensive. In the view of most physicists, the pair had been evasive, self-contradictory, and perhaps less than honest. The mood in the physics community was poisonous. At the Baltimore meeting on May 1, it all erupted.

Neither Pons nor Fleischmann showed up, but Jones, who was not earning the same ire as the other two, was there. Jones was less of a pariah because he had revised his paper for
Nature
, had reported on control experiments with water, and was making much more modest claims than Pons and Fleischmann. And of course, he was appearing before a group of his peers, defending his research. Jones kicked off the session on cold fusion and received a “polite but generally sceptical reception,” according to a
Nature
reporter in attendance. Pons and Fleischmann were the main targets. First, Steve Koonin, a fusion scientist at the California Institute of Technology, rubbished the claims of cold fusion—and then he attacked the scientists who made them. “We’re suffering from the incompetence and delusions of Professors Pons and Fleischmann,” he told the applauding audience. Nathan Lewis, a Caltech chemist, then took up where Koonin left off. He accused Pons and Fleischmann of not stirring the liquid in the cells, allowing hot liquid to accumulate in spots and throwing off their heat calculations. “We asked Pons if he stirred,” said Lewis. “No answer.” In his rapid-fire presentation, Lewis devastated the Pons and Fleischmann claims. If there was any cold fusion at all—an unlikely possibility—it certainly wasn’t the dramatic stuff that the Utah chemists were seeing.

It was a mortal blow. To most mainstream scientists, cold fusion was dead. The
New York Times
’s obituary was a piece entitled “Physicists Debunk Claim of a New Kind of Fusion.” Even the
Wall Street Journal
admitted that the session had been a “devastating” attack on the Utah team’s credibility, but was less willing to give up hope for cold fusion. (Over the next few weeks, the stream of hopeful news—new confirmations and evidence in favor of cold fusion—continued gracing the pages of the
Journal
.) But to most scientists, cold fusion was well and truly dead, even though, as physicist Park noted, the corpse probably would “continue to twitch for a while.” (This was, as it turns out, an understatement.) It was dead to most politicians, too. White House chief of staff John Sununu abruptly cancelled a planned meeting with Pons and Fleischmann on May 4.

The outlook for cold fusion got progressively worse as skeptics piled on, and Pons and Fleischmann got more reclusive and more distant. They failed to attend a cold-fusion meeting later in May. They refused to release an analysis of helium in their palladium rods prepared by the rods’ supplier. They even seemed to undermine the research going on at the University of Utah.

Michael Salamon, a Utah physicist who had been running a gamma-ray detector in the Pons-Fleischmann lab, was encountering bizarre roadblocks; the only time that the cells were “working” seemed to be when his equipment was off line. When Salamon wrote a manuscript for
Nature
on his results—entirely negative—Pons’s lawyer threatened legal action. And, according to Hugo Rossi, the dean of the University of Utah’s College of Science, Pons and Fleischmann didn’t cooperate much with the National Cold Fusion Institute, which was established with the $5 million given by the Utah legislature. Speaking about a former Pons postdoc, Rossi explained, “I discovered after awhile that he had instructions from Pons to do nothing [but] set up fake experiments. I discovered this with the help of the assistants who were working for him. [One of them] told me, ‘You know, those tubes are running, and there are wires running from them, but they’re not hooked up to the computer. Data are not being gathered.’” Pons and Fleischmann lurched toward the fringes of science. But even as they faded from sight, their dream did not die entirely.

 

 

By the end of May, the mainstream scientific community was convinced that cold fusion was a delusion, and its discoverers, Pons and Fleischmann, were considered either colossally incompetent or patently dishonest. (When the story of the moving gamma-ray peak became widely known, the latter became more and more plausible.) The day after the congressional hearing in April, the Department of Energy asked a panel of scientists (including Koonin) to look into the cold-fusion claims. By the time the draft report came out in July, the verdict was no surprise: there was no convincing evidence for cold fusion. The final report, released in November, was a little more conciliatory, expressing sympathy for “modest support” for well-performed studies to tie up some of the loose ends. There were a lot of them.