Sun in a Bottle_The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking

by Charles Seife

  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

  d + d → n + 3He

  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

  d + d → 4He

  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 wide
ly 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.

  Even though Pons and Fleischmann’s own work had been thoroughly debunked, a handful of experimenters still thought they had seen heat or tritium coming from palladium cells. Texas A&M’s John Bockris and Stanford’s Robert Huggins, for example, became staunch supporters of cold fusion based on their labs’ results. And, of course, there was Jones. The scientific community found flaws in all these studies. Jones’s own cells were shown not to be producing neutrons by a team of physicists led by Moshe Gai, a Yale professor. Huggins was criticized at the APS meeting by a fellow Stanford professor, Walter Meyerhof. Bockris’s lab was soon surrounded by intimations of academic fraud, which included spiking cells with tritium from a little bottle. Though the researchers were cleared by a Texas A&M panel, doubts lingered about the quality of their work. This was enough to convince most scientists that cold fusion was not worth any expense of time or effort.

  Nevertheless, positive reports from increasingly sketchy research kept dribbling in. These persuaded some scientists, as well as a number of mainstream organizations, including the Electric Power Research Institute and the Stanford Research Institute, that there had to be something to cold fusion. (As late as October 1989, Edward Teller apparently was in favor of funding cold-fusion experiments.) Despite the scorn of most scientists, the research continued to receive money, although it was getting harder to find. University of Utah president Chase Peterson tried to keep the Cold Fusion Institute alive with a $500,000 infusion from his university’s research fund.58 And so the corpse of cold fusion continued to twitch. Part of what kept the cold-fusion dream alive was the sense of outrage over how Pons and Fleischmann had been treated by the physics community. The smackdown in May had had the air of a public lynching. In its wake, the climate in the physics community had turned from skepticism to scorn. Soon, any cold-fusion believer was ridiculed. It was unseemly, if understandable. A number of people leapt into the fray on the side of the underdogs. The Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger became a cold-fusion supporter and resigned from the American Physical Society in protest over the scientists’ poor treatment. Eugene Mallove, MIT’s chief science writer, quit his post after alleging that some of the anti-cold-fusion physicists at MIT were engaging in fraud. Mallove then started publishing Infinite Energy magazine, which boosted cold-fusion research even as it was getting pushed ever further to the fringes of science.

  When Pons and Fleischmann quietly packed their bags and left for France, where a Japanese consortium had set up a cold-fusion research facility, they left behind a small community of true believers. These cold-fusion aficionados supported and encouraged each other, secure in the belief that a revolutionary idea was being crushed by the scientific establishment. There had been a miscarriage of science, they thought. Pons and Fleischmann had been run out of town by the very hot-fusion physicists who were going to lose their funding because of the chemists’ discovery.

  Pons and Fleischmann continued their research long after the mainstream of science had dismissed cold fusion entirely and had come to consider the whole affair a tremendous embarrassment. The two went their separate ways in the mid-1990s, still insisting they were right, that they had seen excess energy in their palladium cells. The Japanese gave up on cold fusion in 1997, after having spent tens of millions of dollars without any concrete results. The following year, nearly a decade after the scientific community turned its back on the idea, the University of Utah stopped fighting for cold-fusion patents. They were more than $1 million in the hole for lawyer’s fees.

  Steven Jones, too, was driven to the fringe. Though he kept his post at Brigham Young University, his research got increasingly bizarre. A devout Mormon, he tried to prove that Jesus Christ had visited Mesoamerica (he thought that marks on the hands of Mayan gods were evidence that Christ, with his stigmata, was their inspiration). Then, in 2006, he came out with a study that purported to prove that the World Trade Center had been demolished by explosives inside the building, not by the jets that struck from the outside. BYU initiated a review of the research, and Jones retired from the university shortly thereafter.

  If Pons, Fleischmann, and Jones had been the only ones who supported cold fusion, the idea would have long since passed out of the public consciousness. But some serious-sounding scientists at some serious-sounding institutions were convinced that there had to be something to the cold-fusion claims. (Some modern-day cold-fusion work is being done by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, at a few navy laboratories, and even at MIT.) Some mysterious events also lent credence to the cold-fusion conspiracy theories. In 1992, a researcher was killed in an explosion while performing a cold-fusion experiment, and in 2004, Mallove, the most outspoken proponent of the idea, was found on his driveway, beaten to death.

  The cold-fusion movement also drew strength from the press. Reporters seem genetically predisposed to take the side of the underdog, and the cold-fusion-versus-big-science story certainly had one. Some journalists were true believers, and others just were offended by mainstream science’s treatment of the cold-fusion researchers. Their gripes came out as a slow and steady drumbeat. “These folks need a fair hearing,” said ABC News science correspondent Michael Guillen in 1994. In 1998, Wired’s Charles Platt suggested that ignoring new cold-fusion research might be “a colossal conspiracy of denial.” The Wall Street Journal returned to its cold-fusion roots in 2003 with a column by the esteemed science journalist Sharon Begley: “Cold fusion today is a prime example of pathological science, but not because its adherents are delusional.... The real pathology,” she wrote, “is the breakdown of the normal channels of scientific communication, with no scientists outside the tight-knit cold-fusion tribe bothering to scrutinize its claims.”

  Mainstream physicists saw it differently, of course. Despite the fact that Pons and Fleischmann were claiming something extraordinary—ridiculous, even—the scientific community had scrutinized their claims. They found the Utah group’s work sloppy at best, and systematically demolished the chemists’ claims. Cold-fusion advocates had spent millions of dollars researching the phenomenon and still did not have a device that could reliably heat a cup of water for tea. The burden of proof, as always in science, is on the people who claim extraordinary things. It is their responsibility to perform an experiment so good that it forces the scientific community to abandon its prior beliefs.

  This may be the scientific attitude, but it comes across as terribly arrogant, and that served to increase the power of the cold-fusion lobby. By 2004, the pressure had grown to the point that the Department of Energy felt it necessary to review whether cold fusion merited renewed funding. (The term cold fusion had been dropped in favor of the less-pejorative low-energy nuclear reactions.) The conclusions were much the same as they had been a decade and a half earlier. Yet the mere existence of the review was an indication of the power of the cold-fusion lobby. And the more that people tried to stomp on cold-fusion enthusiasts, the stronger the movement became.

  The lure of cold fusion and the promise of unlimited, free energy is, itself, a source of power to be reckoned with. Patent examiner Thomas Valone has been under its spell for more than a decade. In 1998, after having worked at the patent office for a few years, he broadcast a plea for cold-fusion aficionados to join him in his line of work, according to Science magazine. “Valone called for ‘all able-bodied free energy technologists’ to ‘infiltrate’ the Patent Office”—presumably to benefit like-minded cold-fusion and free-energy enthusiasts seeking patents. Valone then attempted to organi
ze what was to be called the First International Conference on Free Energy, which was to be held at the State Department. Mainstream physicists were appalled, including the American Physical Society’s Robert Park, who featured the conference in his acerbic weekly What’s New newsletter. “The speakers list for CoFE is certainly open minded; topics include: assisted nuclear reactions (a.k.a. cold fusion), sonoluminesence (a.k.a. cold fusion), hydrogen technologies (a.k.a. cold fusion), tabletop nuclear transformations (a.k.a. cold fusion),” Park wrote, noting that the conference was to be held under the “auspices of the U.S. State Department in the Dean Acheson Auditorium.” An embarrassed State Department booted the conference, but the meeting survived. Within a few weeks it was renamed the First International Conference on Future Energy, and it had apparently found another home. Valone billed the event as being held “In cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce”—the department that runs the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Commerce kicked the conference to the curb. Valone, too.

  In May 1999, a week after Valone’s conference took place in a Bethesda hotel, his supervisors started a process to remove him from his job, alleging, among other things, that he had misrepresented the Commerce Department’s role in the conference. By the end of August, he was fired—but Valone filed a grievance. He felt he was being unfairly persecuted for his beliefs.