Sun in a Bottle (27 page)

 

Like Riedinger’s comments to me, the Oak Ridge press release was as negative and cautious as it could possibly be without directly undermining Taleyarkhan. Everybody at Oak Ridge was carefully watching their words.

I was, too. Over the weekend, after a few last-minute e-mails, I put the finishing touches on the first draft of the article. I had been asked to send a copy to Don Kennedy, so I did. It was an unusual request. Kennedy, as the editor in chief of
Science
, had the final say over everything that appeared in the pages. However, like his predecessors, he was pretty hands-off, at least when it came to the news section. We reporters were reasonably insulated from the politics of the magazine.

On Monday, I heard back from Don Kennedy. He seemed a little annoyed by the tone of my piece. The references to cold fusion and the use of the word
tabletop
bothered him. I stood my ground, arguing that everyone was, rightly or wrongly, comparing bubble fusion to cold fusion and so we had to use the term. As for tabletop, Taleyarkhan had used the word, as had
Science
’s own press release. Kennedy immediately relented:

 

The term
cold fusion
was clearly driving the editors at
Science
to distraction. On the morning of Monday, March 4,
Science
’s press office admonished reporters who were even thinking of using the phrase:

 

In the same notice, the press office told of the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper and offered to provide it to reporters, as well as a response by Taleyarkhan’s team. (Oddly enough, Taleyarkhan’s team looked through the raw data provided by Shapira and Saltmarsh and claimed to see evidence of neutrons that the two were ignoring.)

The situation had already reached a boiling point. By 1:30 PM on Monday, the embargo was blown. The press office lifted all restrictions on using the articles and begged, once more, that journalists write a balanced story.

“Here we go. . . . Fasten your seatbelts,” one editor told me. It was all over the Internet in seconds. My article was being made available to reporters as well, and I started getting phone calls from television producers inviting me to talk on the air about bubble fusion.
⁷²

The press coverage ran the gamut from optimistic and credulous (“Fusion ‘Breakthrough’ Heralds Cleaner Energy,” trumpeted London’s
Guardian
) to pessimistic and weary (“Here we go again; Table-top fusion,” sighed the
Economist
). Most were in the middle. My impression was that television reporters (as usual) were more keen on bubble fusion than their print counterparts, but few went overboard. After an intense burst of interest for a week or so, the media frenzy began to calm down. But an undercurrent of bad feeling remained within the science community.

I knew that
Science
would be vulnerable to attack because of the bubble fusion paper, but I was surprised by the source of the most damning criticism. A week after the story broke, three of the reviewers of the paper—Putterman, Crum, and William Moss, a sonoluminescence theorist at Livermore—told the
Washington Post
that
Science
had published the Taleyarkhan paper over their objections:

 

Now this—this surprised me. I had been so busy looking for the neutrons that I didn’t spend a lot of time with sonoluminescence physicists. And what I heard from them had been complimentary, if cautious. (After all, Crum had even used the word “doggone” when describing the beauty of Taleyarkhan’s idea!) Shortly after the
Washington Post
story, Ken Suslick, too, chimed in. In the beginning of April, Putterman, Suslick, and Crum wrote a short criticism of the Taleyarkhan paper, arguing that it had been “unready for publication” and suffered from “substandard experimental techniques.”

The public criticism was not coming from fusion scientists, but sonoluminescence people,
⁷³
and from those I thought were reasonably supportive of Taleyarkhan’s technique. When I had interviewed Crum, and he admitted that he was a reviewer, he seemed positive enough that it didn’t occur to me to ask whether he suggested rejecting the paper. I had completely missed it. The three reviewers were also heaping criticism on
Science
’s review process. Later in the year, Putterman challenged
Science
to publish the positive reviews: “Somewhere out there is a positive report from someone,” he told
Nature
,
Science
magazine’s main rival. “
Science
should publish that report because then we’ll see what kind of information they went on to overrule four negative reviewers.” Of course, Don Kennedy refused. “We maintain our end of the confidentiality bargain about peer review, so I can’t discuss the process specifically, except to say that the positive reviews outweighed the negative ones. Why else should we publish the paper?”

Did
Science
overrule the virulent objections of its reviewers and deliberately publish a bad story? Were the sonoluminescence people jumping on the anti-bubble-fusion bandwagon after it got hammered by Shapira, Saltmarsh, and other fusion scientists? Unfortunately, I don’t know for sure.

Science
is a peer-reviewed journal. But it is also a magazine. And magazines, especially those that run advertisements and classifieds, are always trying to boost their circulation. Peer-reviewed journals like to publish provocative and spectacular results in their pages to get extra attention. Sometimes this leads to bad science; even the best peer-reviewed journals occasionally publish substandard manuscripts in their pages. (
Nature
’s letters section, for example, is notorious for occasionally publishing attention-grabbing but dubious research.) The editor who received the bubble fusion manuscript might have been influenced by the spectacular nature of the claims, but at the same time, I don’t think that he (or other editors at
Science
) were consciously gaming the peer-review system to accept a manuscript that its reviewers had clearly rejected.

Though I have never gotten my hands on them, I believe that the reviews of Taleyarkhan’s paper were mixed—skeptical and admiring at the same time—and that there was enough innovation in the experiment’s technique that the editor in charge felt that the reviews were sufficiently positive to merit publication. However, even today, I have to shrug my shoulders when asked what happened behind the scenes during Taleyarkhan’s peer review. Frankly, when the bubble fusion frenzy diminished, I was relieved.

The story continued to simmer in the background. In July 2002, I covered an article by Suslick that appeared in
Nature
. Suslick and a colleague had used fluorescent dyes to measure the by-products of sonoluminescence in water and compared them to theorists’ expectations. “They’re saying, ‘We understand what’s going on inside the bubble,’ and if this is what you believe the science is, you should be suspicious of the Taleyarkhan paper,” Crum told me. (I wasn’t able to reach Taleyarkhan for comment by deadline, unfortunately.) After my article ran, Putterman dropped me a note saying that I was taking the theoretical work too seriously. I didn’t agree entirely, but the point was valid if a little odd. He seemed not to want to dilute the direct criticism of Taleyarkhan’s
Science
experiment with less-direct criticism from a theoretical perspective.

Taleyarkhan had also been busy. Oak Ridge had included him on a team of scientists assembled to attempt an experiment that would end the controversy once and for all, but the Department of Energy refused to pony up the necessary money. In 2003, Taleyarkhan quit his post at Oak Ridge in favor of a named chair in Purdue University’s School of Nuclear Engineering. In 2004, he published a paper in
Physical Review E
, a high-level peer-reviewed physics journal, that seemed to confirm his original findings. I didn’t think it added much to the debate, so I didn’t cover it, despite an overheated press release from Purdue:

 

The
New York Times
covered the paper, as did a few other outlets, but it didn’t spark a huge amount of discussion, even though Crum told the
Times
that the new work was “much better” than what had appeared in
Science.
Nor did another confirming paper, written by Adam Butt and Yiban Xu, that appeared in a lesser journal,
Nuclear Engineering and Design
, raise any eyebrows. In this case, Purdue’s press release stressed the independence of the new work:

 

Taleyarkhan saw this as a great achievement, and in 2006 he wrote about how his results had been “independently confirmed.” This claim, too, was about to be challenged.

In 2005, I resigned from
Science
magazine to become a professor of journalism at New York University. So when the bubble fusion affair exploded again, I was watching from the sidelines. It was a much more comfortable position.

 

 

The bubble fusion affair began very differently from the cold-fusion fiasco. Unlike Pons and Fleischmann, Taleyarkhan and his team had not sought publicity until their research had been peer-reviewed by a major journal. Once
Science
stamped its imprimatur on the work, then the group could claim they were doing the right thing, at least according to the traditions of science—they were steering debate about the work into the scientific literature. Of course, there were questions about their competence as well as their conduct. For example, why hadn’t they withdrawn their paper after the devastating counterexperiment by Shapira and Saltmarsh?

I suspect they felt that Oak Ridge was trying to undermine their work and rob them of a publication in a prestigious journal. They were unconvinced (and perhaps uncomprehending) of the importance of the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper. The embattled bubble fusion scientists began to get paranoid, too. When the story first broke, Taleyarkhan’s coauthor (and PhD thesis adviser), Richard Lahey, told the
Washington Post
that criticism of the paper was “political” and motivated by hot-fusion physicists who were trying to hold on to their big budgets. Throw on top of that their desire to patent the device and profit from it, and I doubt they ever seriously considered withdrawing the paper. In my opinion, not withdrawing, even despite the Shapira and Saltmarsh counterevidence, did not cross the line into scientific misconduct, though some anti-bubble-fusion scientists seemed to believe otherwise.

With bubble fusion, there were no moving peaks, no firm accusations of scientific fraud—at least at first. As time passed, though, the story of bubble fusion did begin to mirror the cold-fusion fiasco ever more closely. An embattled Taleyarkhan would soon find himself under investigation and accused of fraud.

The story began to stir again in 2005, in part because of a BBC science documentary. BBC’s science show,
Horizon
, interviewed Taleyarkhan and commissioned Seth Putterman to redo the Taleyarkhan experiment on TV. The results were completely negative. How many neutrons had Putterman seen coming from a bubble fusion cell? None at all. When the program, entitled “An Experiment to Save the World,” aired, Taleyarkhan looked foolish—even talking about his hopes for a Nobel. “Nuclear fusion is a major finding, some people think that it may be worthy of a Nobel Prize,” he said on the show. “It would be nice if it were. But I don’t, I don’t keep dreaming about it just now, if it happens so be it.” Apparently, as filming progressed, Taleyarkhan got increasingly suspicious, and he refused to help the Putterman team with the experiment.