Sun in a Bottle (25 page)

I was uneasy. The content of the graph did not rule out the claim of fusion. Taleyarkhan’s team may well have seen neutrons that were drop-dead evidence of fusion. But if they did, I couldn’t tell from the graph. If they had confirmatory data, they were not presenting it in a convincing way. If they didn’t know how to convince other scientists of their claims, I suspected that they didn’t know enough about the field to make such claims in the first place.

That was my initial impression. But as a journalist, I’ve learned that first impressions are very often wrong. In fact, I wanted to be convinced that I had erred in my snap judgment, if for no other reason than I thought it would make a better story if Taleyarkhan was correct. Furthermore, I knew that the manuscript had gone through
Science
’s peer-review process. The editor who had handled the manuscript—I presumed that it was our physics editor, Ian Osborne—did not laugh it out of the room when he read it. The peer reviewers (whose identities I didn’t know) had also, presumably, vetted the manuscript and found it worthy of publication. This certainly did not ensure that Taleyarkhan and his colleagues were right, but it did theoretically mean that there were no obvious flaws.

I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I wanted to figure out whether bubble fusion was real. If it was, it could be the biggest science news to come around in a long time. I wrote back to Coontz. Of
course
I wanted to cover the story.

 

 

When Coontz first sent me the paper on February 5, he told me of an additional complication. The editors were afraid of an embargo break.

The embargo system is the dirty little secret of science journalism. Over the past few decades, science journalists entered into a compact with peer-reviewed journals like
Science
,
Nature
, and the
New England Journal of Medicine
. The journals provide copies of manuscripts to reporters a few days ahead of publication; these journalists, in return, agree not to tell the public about the manuscripts until the embargo expires, usually the evening before the peer-reviewed journal is published. Journalists who break the embargo, publishing ahead of the set time, are threatened with the loss of access to advance manuscripts, putting them at a great disadvantage with respect to their peers who abide by the rules. Nonetheless, some stories are so juicy that reporters can’t resist; word inevitably leaks out before the embargo expires (often the fault of British newspapers, whose reporters are particularly jumpy). The embargo breaks, and it’s a free-for-all.

Bubble fusion was obviously a juicy story, so the slightest word leaking to the press could trigger a media feeding frenzy. It was crucial to the editors that nothing be reported in the newspapers until the final version of the manuscript was ready. If the press started talking about the experiment before the paper was available, it could easily be a repeat of the cold-fusion disaster—science by press conference. It would not be fair to Taleyarkhan and his colleagues, who went through the peer-review process, to open them to accusations of subverting the system. Security had to be extraordinarily tight.

The paper was to be published on February 14. I was asked not to contact any scientists other than the authors until February 8, so that word of the paper wouldn’t spread. It wasn’t an extraordinary request, and I could certainly hold off on some of the phone calls for three days. But I had to contact Taleyarkhan right away. After I digested the paper, I sent him an e-mail to set up an interview; I also asked whether he was the same Taleyarkhan of the variable-speed bullets.

He was. He remembered the story I had written in 1999 and hinted darkly in his e-mail reply that the government might try to keep bubble fusion a secret, just as they had done with his earlier research. “Right after you did your story my project got classified. I hope something like this does not happen to this area. That would be a shame.” In the rest of the note Taleyarkhan clearly showed that he thought he had made an important discovery. “This current area could have somewhat revolutionary and far-reaching consequences with very significant impacts on everyday life and a variety of disciplines (ranging from materials synthesis to medicine to food sterilization to counter-terrorism to power production and the like).” Power production. There it was. He hedged, and he put it last in his list, but it was there. Taleyarkhan thought he had found a path to fusion energy. This was going to be a big story, one way or another. Taleyarkhan and I made an appointment to speak on Friday, February 8. On the evening of February 6, I learned that the bubble fusion article was on hold. Taleyarkhan’s employer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was trying to apply the brakes. Gil Gilliland, an associate director of Oak Ridge, apparently called
Science
and complained that the paper had not yet passed Oak Ridge’s internal review process, which had been ongoing since November. (This was an unusually long time to spend on a review.) Gilliland promised to get the review finished as soon as humanly possible, and the manuscript was rescheduled for publication on March 8. I was asked to hold off on the interviews until the paper was back on track. I didn’t know it at the time, but the scene at Oak Ridge was getting ugly.

In fact, a battle was brewing. A number of physicists at the laboratory were extremely doubtful of the bubble fusion research, and their doubt triggered a flurry of activity behind the scenes. Shortly after Taleyarkhan submitted the manuscript—with Oak Ridge’s permission—to
Science
, the skepticism in the lab began to mount. Lab officials apparently asked two other Oak Ridge scientists, Dan Shapira and Michael Saltmarsh, to repeat the bubble fusion experiment. Saltmarsh was a fusion scientist who had testified before Congress about the cold-fusion affair. Shapira studied exotic fusion reactions induced by high-energy beams of ions. Both had the expertise to find neutrons from bubble fusion—if those neutrons existed.

Calling for other scientists to repeat an experiment before publication was an extremely unusual step, and it likely struck Taleyarkhan as a vote of no confidence, but Oak Ridge insisted. The lab seemed determined to avoid becoming the center of another cold-fusion fiasco. So, with Taleyarkhan’s assistance, Shapira and Saltmarsh set up an exact copy of the bubble fusion experiment, except for one detail: they used a bigger and better neutron detector. Not only was it physically larger (making it more sensitive, because more neutrons could strike it), but it also had more sophisticated electronics. Unlike Taleyarkhan’s detector, it could tell the difference between neutrons and gamma rays.

When Shapira and Saltmarsh analyzed the data they had gathered, the results were damning. They found no sign of fusion, no evidence for neutron emission from the bubbling deuterated acetone. They did not try to verify Taleyarkhan’s findings of tritium, but noted that if the tritium had been produced by fusion, the bubbling solution should have produced a million neutrons per second, and that level of activity should easily have been picked up by the neutron detector. According to their equipment, though, nothing was happening in the bubbling liquid, just the expected number of chirps caused by stray neutrons produced by cosmic rays and the like. (And since the team members were making bubbles by zapping the tank with neutrons, a heck of a lot of those particles were skittering about in the background.)

Oak Ridge was in a bind. They were about to look foolish. One of their researchers was about to publish what they considered a bad piece of research that would spark a second cold-fusion fiasco. And they were increasingly powerless to stop it. The lab had already given Taleyarkhan permission to seek publication, and
Science
had already accepted and reviewed the manuscript. Yet Oak Ridge seemed to have an experiment that blew the Taleyarkhan discovery out of the water. They were rapidly running out of options.

Scrapping the paper ceased to be a possibility the moment Taleyarkhan had sent the paper to the journal. However, Oak Ridge’s objections had slowed publication by a few weeks. In that time, the lab moved fast to try to reduce the impending damage. Shapira and Saltmarsh quickly typed up their results in a short report and sent it over to
Science
, hoping the two papers would be published side by side. The negative report, if accepted, would at least force readers to cast a skeptical eye on the claims of bubble fusion; Oak Ridge wouldn’t look quite so bad when other researchers poked holes in Taleyarkhan’s work. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option, either. Any scientific manuscript in
Science
had to be peer reviewed, and the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper was no exception. There was no way that a new paper could be sent to reviewers, receive comments, and be revised in time to make the March 8 issue. (And it was becoming increasingly clear that holding beyond March 8 would be impossible; word of Taleyarkhan’s paper was beginning to leak out.) Oak Ridge had no options left. The world would soon learn about bubble fusion, even though Shapira and Saltmarsh had shown that it was almost certainly a fiction.

I was back on the case on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 20. The
Science
editors had decided to go ahead and publish the article on March 8, and while formal approval had not yet come through from Oak Ridge, they had assurances that it would come shortly. (And it did.) I was given the green light to begin reporting again, but I was warned to tread carefully to avoid leaks. I immediately e-mailed Taleyarkhan again and set up an interview. That part was easy. The hard part was figuring whom else to talk to.

I needed to speak to outside researchers, people not in Taleyarkhan’s research group. Only then would I get a reasonably objective opinion on the quality of the paper. At this stage, I couldn’t show the manuscript to anyone who hadn’t yet seen it; I couldn’t be responsible for a leak this far ahead of publication. So I had to figure out who had already seen the paper—I had to find the paper’s reviewers.

Nobody at
Science
would tell me who they were. The reviewers are kept confidential, even from the reporters who work for the same magazine. But I could guess. The Taleyarkhan paper crossed two fairly established disciplines, sonoluminescence and fusion. Just a few groups had been studying sonoluminescence for years. Lawrence Crum led one at the University of Washington, Seth Putterman led another at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Ken Suslick ran a third at the University of Illinois. I was fairly certain that at least one of these scientists had been a reviewer. The fusion side of the paper was tougher. It was a bigger field, with many more researchers. I figured that the most likely candidates were those who knew about the nitty-gritty of neutron detection. If anyone would be able to bolster or tear down Taleyarkhan’s work, it would be a neutron expert. In fact, if I were to pick reviewers for the manuscript, I would choose some of the physicists who had dissected the cold-fusion papers. They would certainly approach the paper with a skeptical eye, and if they were convinced, the paper would automatically get a huge amount of credibility.

I began making discreet inquiries.
⁶⁸
On the sonoluminescence end, I called Crum and struck pay dirt. (As it turned out, all three of the big names in sonoluminescence—Crum, Putterman, and Suslick—had been reviewers.) I got the distinct impression that the sonoluminescence people were impressed by Taleyarkhan’s technique, if a bit skeptical about his team’s conclusions. Crum, at the very least, seemed particularly interested in Taleyarkhan’s method of creating large bubbles with a beam of neutrons and thought it might open some new opportunities for research. (“I thought, doggone! I’m depressed I hadn’t done that experiment,” Crum told me. “It’s a remarkable result, and I would like very much for this to be true.”) So the sonoluminescence end of the experiment seemed relatively solid, at least from my limited reporting.

By that time, the editors had given me more detailed neutron data from Taleyarkhan’s lab. The new information didn’t assuage my doubts. I was no expert at interpreting such data, but they didn’t look quite right. They were muddy; the shape of the peaks in the graph didn’t appear the way I expected them to. These were just my gut instincts, but they emphasized my need to find a neutron expert.

When the time came for my interview with Taleyarkhan, I found him open and friendly. He was happy to tell me all about the research. I confirmed that he was, quite naturally, enthusiastic about the quality of the results—including the neutrons he was detecting. However, no matter how confident Taleyarkhan was, he was not going to be the person who could assure me about the quality of the research. I still had not found a neutron expert who had already seen the paper, especially since I was still supposed to be very discreet. That problem was about to be made moot.

I had sensed that the editors at
Science
were getting increasingly tense. By the twenty-sixth, I had heard rumors in the building that somebody was trying to pressure the journal to reject the Taleyarkhan paper, and that
Science
’s editor in chief, Don Kennedy, was hopping mad. I didn’t know anything more for certain until the morning of February 27, when Coontz passed me a cryptic note. He told me I had to call Princeton’s Will Happer and IBM’s Dick Garwin.

Happer and Garwin were legendary figures in the community. They were the big guns of fusion (and of nuclear weapons). Garwin had helped design Ivy Mike; Happer was a former head of the government’s JASON panel. Both had been at the top of the scientific hierarchy for decades and had been involved in debunking cold fusion. They weren’t reviewers of the manuscript—I was pretty certain of that—but clearly they had seen it. And they apparently had some very strong opinions that they expressed to Don Kennedy.
⁶⁹

I didn’t know what Happer and Garwin said, but I knew that Kennedy was furious. He felt that outsiders were trying to disrupt the peer-review process and derail a paper that had already been accepted for publication. “There was certainly pressure from Oak Ridge to delay, if not to kill, the paper,” Kennedy told me when I interviewed him. “I’m annoyed at the intervention, I’m annoyed at the assumptions that non-authors had the authority to exercise constraints on the publication and telling us we couldn’t publish the paper—which they did.”