Sun in a Bottle (26 page)

I called Happer and began to piece together what was going on. (Garwin was in China at the time but I soon got his side of the story, too.) Someone—I never found out for sure who it was—had sent Garwin and Happer each a copy of the Taleyarkhan manuscript and a copy of the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper. Both then e-mailed Kennedy. Garwin was harsh and succinct:

 

Happer’s note was longer and more involved, but he, too, urged Kennedy not to hype the results, likening it to cold fusion and polywater:
⁷⁰

 

Happer strongly argued that the Taleyarkhan paper was in error, and said that several other prominent fusion researchers (including the laser fusion scientist John Nuckolls) had concluded that Taleyarkhan was flat-out wrong. But at the same time, Happer insisted that he wasn’t trying to block publication. “I like
Science
; I’m a member of AAAS,
⁷¹
and I don’t want them to shoot themselves in the foot—or some other body part,” Happer told me. “All I told him was, for God’s sake don’t put it on the cover of
Science
.” Garwin was a little more oblique about what
Science
should do with the bubble fusion manuscript. “It would be unfortunate if
Science
magazine were to take any position on its correctness,” he said.

There’s no question in my mind that Happer and Garwin would have been happy if
Science
had pulled the Taleyarkhan paper. They were convinced (as I was becoming) that bubble fusion was a fiction. However, I think that by the time they contacted Kennedy, they knew that
Science
was likely to publish the paper. They just wanted to minimize the damage to Oak Ridge and to the journal and, above all, to science. Don’t hype the results. Don’t put it on the cover. Don’t go out on a limb for bubble fusion.

Kennedy, not unreasonably, interpreted the notes slightly differently. He saw it as a last-ditch attempt by Oak Ridge to quash publication. His response to Happer was measured, if indignant.
Science
editors had taken exceptional care with the manuscript, he insisted, and the review process had led to a firm recommendation to publish:

 

It was getting more complicated by the minute, but now that the Taleyarkhan paper was circulating around the physics community, I was freed from the high level of secrecy that had hampered my investigations. I made dozens of phone calls to scientists around the country, asking not only about bubble fusion but also about what had happened with the review process at Oak Ridge. I knew about Shapira and Saltmarsh, so I contacted them. I also spoke to one of Oak Ridge’s deputy directors, Lee Riedinger.

I was pretty sure Riedinger thought bubble fusion was garbage—but he never said so directly. “I’m confused,” he told me, when I asked him whether he believed the Taleyarkhan experiment or the Shapira-Saltmarsh one. “There’s an active dialogue back and forth about what could be wrong with either set of measurements.” Riedinger seemed to be walking a very fine line. He was trying to temper enthusiasm for Taleyarkhan’s results without publicly faulting his own employee’s research. (And he went out of his way to compliment Taleyarkhan’s abilities, adding that his work is “very novel and interesting.”)

I found a fusion expert at Livermore, Mike Moran, who had also done sonoluminescence—with deuterated water, no less—and I asked him what he thought of the paper. “The paper’s kind of a patchwork, technically, and each of the patches has a hole in it,” he told me, and pointed out a number of damning flaws that I hadn’t considered. Taleyarkhan’s experiment seemed to be producing some tritium, and the tritium production disappeared when the sound-wave generator wasn’t operating. Moran pointed out that this disappearance was a problem. A deuterated solution that had been irradiated by neutrons should show an increase in tritium levels whether or not the sound-wave generator—which collapsed the bubbles to ignite fusion—was working. Even without the fusion reactions, some of those neutrons would strike deuteriums and stick, creating tritium. In Taleyarkhan’s experiment, this was not the case; the control experiment with deuterated acetone and no sound-wave generator showed no increase in tritium. “If he’s really right, it should have shown up,” Moran said. “It’s an inconsistency in the data.”

I was convinced. Taleyarkhan was wrong: bubble fusion was a fiction. And because of the spurious result, a scientific drama was playing out before my eyes. The officials at Oak Ridge felt that the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper was damning, and they were hoping to avoid embarrassment. Garwin and Happer were trying to prevent another cold-fusion controversy, and Kennedy was trying to preserve the integrity of the peer-review process. Rumors were flying, and they were getting nastier and more paranoid by the minute. Everybody was getting increasingly annoyed with everyone else.

I got a note from Happer on Friday, March 1. He relayed part of a message from an unnamed colleague (not from Princeton or Oak Ridge) who was telling people of rumors that I had been “calling around asking about activities surrounding the publication of the article, not the ‘science’ in the article.” That message continued:

 

The story had just gotten harder. The allegations were absurd—Kennedy had not influenced me at all, so I could hardly be his attack dog. However, it would be impossible to get honest opinions from physicists who believed that I was preparing a hatchet job at the behest of Don Kennedy. Later in the day, Happer sent a final note:

 

I had been Omar Khayyamed.

Happer need not have reminded me. Of course I was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the situation. People were quite likely to get their first impression about bubble fusion from my article at the front of the magazine. I was skeptical, and I wanted that skepticism to come through, but at the same time I wanted to make sure that everybody’s view was represented fairly: the researchers, the editors, and the skeptics. In my mind, the whole bubble fusion controversy was fueled by these three parties’ tragic mutual incomprehension.

The bubble fusion story was about more than a scientific paper. It had become a story about the way science is done—and how the scientific peer-review process sometimes fails. The original ending to my piece grimly emphasized the point:

 

This ending was scrapped in favor of a less-editorializing one. Yet even as I penned those words, the misunderstanding built. Bob Park, the tireless critic of pseudoscience (particularly cold fusion and its proponents, such as Thomas Valone, the patent examiner), featured bubble fusion in his weekly
What’s New
newsletter, which is distributed on Friday afternoons:

 

Infinite Energy
, of course, was the cold-fusion activist Eugene Mallove’s publication. Park was uncharacteristically wrong about the cover; bubble fusion was never going to be a cover story. However, his comment meant that the hitherto private controversy was about to become very public.

Over the weekend, the rumors flew, as did the press releases.
Science
distributed one as part of the weekly embargoed notification to journalists:

 

It was optimistic, but not outrageous. The biggest problem, in my mind, is that it did not mention the Shapira and Saltmarsh manuscript. That was a major oversight, though I am not sure whether the press office was even aware of the paper at the time.

Reporters who received
Science
’s press package could get the Taleyarkhan paper, but the information was embargoed until 2 PM on Thursday, March 7. Only then would science reporters be allowed to print their stories.

There was also an Oak Ridge press release, but I didn’t see it until a few days later. Its tone was a little more pessimistic: