Stunning Claim Undoes His Calm Life : Shock Wave of Notoriety Swamps Fusion Scientist
The scientist whose name is mentioned these days with Edison and Einstein came to his front door in a rugby shirt, stocking feet and bad mood. “I can’t find my slides,” B. Stanley Pons snapped.
Yes, the slides were missing, the ones Pons had used to illustrate nuclear fusion. Somebody apparently stole them in the chaos that followed a press conference here last week in which Pons and a British colleague announced that they had sustained fusion energy at room temperature using a simple table-top device.
Their extraordinary claim--a potential breakthrough in science’s dream to someday use non-polluting seawater instead of fossil fuels for the world’s energy needs--landed like an A-bomb and caught Pons squarely in its shock waves.
Not only have his slides disappeared. So too has any semblance of a normal life. The 46-year-old electrochemistry professor from the University of Utah is hounded day and night by reporters. Students want his autograph. Other scientists from across the globe are clamoring for his research data.
And, if all that were not enough, many in oil-depressed Utah already are banking on Pons and his findings to save the state economically.
Gov. Norm Bangerter intends to haul Utah’s legislators into special session next week to give Pons $5 million for research so that Utah can begin to capitalize on nuclear fusion. James C. Fletcher, a former University of Utah president, who announced earlier that he is quitting his post as NASA administrator, will come back here to the “U.,” as it is known locally, to lead the college’s fight for fusion.
“Before this, most people . . . thought of Utah as that funny state between Colorado and the West Coast,” observed U. chemistry professor Rick Steiner. “Now, I think, we’re going to see things happen. . . . “
No doubt the talk is premature until the work is confirmed. At least nine other research groups are trying to replicate the results. “This had better work,” said one University of Utah professor, who asked to remain anonymous. “Because if it doesn’t work, this department, this university and that man are going to be laughingstocks.”
Stuff of Nobel Prizes
But in the corridors of the Henry Eyring Chemistry Building, there is speculation that Pons’ work--assuming it withstands the scrutiny of his peers--is the stuff of Nobel Prizes.
For the normally low-key professor, who wears glasses, a Julius Caesar haircut and has spent the bulk of his life cradled in laboratory solitude, the whole affair has been rather unnerving.
“I love science,” Pons said, a twinge of his native North Carolina still evident in his words. “I love science so much that I’ll work seven days a week. But it’s been so crazy around here lately that I have to go to the lab at midnight just to get anything done.”
His first grandchild, Emily Ann, was born two days before The Announcement; he barely got a chance to kiss her before all hell broke loose. His time has become such a precious commodity in the last week that he has had to step down as chairman of the chemistry department to better devote himself to the speeches, technical papers and the other trappings that come with scientific notoriety.
By his own account, Pons has come far from that Christmas Day 40 years ago when he got his first chemistry set and “got into trouble with it right away.”
Asked to offer up some recollections that would accurately portray his youth, he mentions blowing out his grandmother’s window with a BB gun and running the mile, with some success, for his high school track team.
In 1965, he got his bachelor’s degree at Wake Forest University and went to the University of Michigan to study for a doctorate in chemistry. Two months shy of earning his Ph.D., and realizing that there were few jobs in chemistry at the time, Pons quit school to work in his father’s textile firm.
But he had been bitten by the bug of science. When that happens, as they say in the Carolinas, you live with the sting.
After toiling in textiles for two years, he went back to school and, in 1979, finished his studies with a doctorate from the University of Southampton in England. It was there that he became a friend of Martin Fleischmann, an electrochemistry professor with whom he would eventually work on the nuclear fusion experiment.
Following college teaching stints in Michigan and Alberta, Canada, Pons landed here at the 25,000-student, land grant university. It is a handsome, open campus, a mix of old gray granite and modernistic red brick, snugged up against the Wasatch National Forest on the eastern fringes of Salt Lake City.
The chemistry department to which Pons came in 1983 is among the school’s strong points, administrators say. It is not the kind of staid and musty hall of academia one might remember from college days gone by.
Sure, there are still one or two white-haired professors in white coats wandering around, sucking contemplatively on meerschaum pipes, and there are still the ubiquitous beakers and flasks, filled with boiling, eerily colored liquids. But by and large, the 2-year-old building where Pons and Fleischmann made what may be among the greatest scientific discoveries since electricity is alive with youth and humor, such as it is.
This week, for example, somebody in the department distributed a parody press release which describes how another chemistry professor at the U. achieved fusion by cooking a salt compound until it was rock hard.
“We are not,” said graduate student Andrea Russell, “your average bunch of geeks. Neither is Stan Pons.”
Draws Criticism
But it is the university’s “science by press release” approach with the fusion work that has drawn perhaps the most criticism from other scientists who feel that Pons and Fleischmann should have followed protocol and waited until their work was published in a scientific journal. Some suggest that the U. hastily called the press conference out of fear that scientists at Brigham Young University, 45 miles down the road in Provo, were about to release results of their own, similar fusion studies.
“Not true,” Pons said. “There was a lot of misinformation about what we were doing floating around, which could be dangerous if somebody else tried it, and we just felt it was the right thing to do. What’s the difference if we had a press conference before the results were published? The same (response) would have happened after they were published, anyway.”
Many scientists might consider such a statement scientific heresy, but Pons is anything but conventional.
The father of six children and married to his third wife, Pons drives a four-wheel-drive truck and owns one necktie. He likes country-Western music or the rock group Dire Straits pounding in his ears as he works on equations in the basement of his ranch-style tract home, which is close to campus and next door to a Nazarene church.
Colleagues describe him as a good skier, an avid fisherman, a frustrated gardener (the birds keep eating his flowers), a giving teacher who has sometimes loaned money to his students, and a gourmet cook who can whip up a bouillabaisse with ease.
“Violent cooking,” is how Pons describes his efforts in the kitchen, “usually done over Jack Daniels.”
Whiskey, he notes, was also the favored drink when he and Fleischmann, a frequent visitor to Pons’ home, sat around the kitchen table one day five years ago and mapped out an experiment on nuclear fusion “just for the fun of it.”
Scientists have spent more than three decades and billions of dollars on research trying to figure out how to create and sustain nuclear fusion reactions as a potential energy source. In nature, the energy of the sun and other stars is supplied by fusion, a process that is thought to give off far less radiation than the nuclear fission processes used today in nuclear power plants, in which atoms are split apart rather than fused together.
However, there has been a frustrating hitch in previous studies: to create a fusion reaction, scientists have had to heat materials to millions of degrees, hotter than the core of the sun. The amount of energy expended during these experiments has been more than the amount produced.
What Pons and Fleischmann did was take a flask about the size of a drinking glass and insert a cylinder of the metal palladium wrapped in a platinum coil, creating an electrode. They filled the flask with a compound made up of one part oxygen and two parts deuterium--a form of “heavy water” easily obtained from seawater.
A gentle electrical current was applied to the electrode, causing the deuterium to concentrate in the palladium. That, in turn, caused the deuterium atoms to fuse together at room temperatures, creating-- voila!-- net energy, according to Pons.
“It was a very simple experiment, a one-in-a-billion shot,” Pons said. “We were very lucky.”
An Endless Supply
If the idea can be developed on a grander scale, say car engines or power plants, the oceans could supply all of the Earth’s energy needs. One cubic foot of seawater contains enough deuterium to produce as much energy through fusion as through burning 10 tons of coal.
No more air pollution. No more oil spills. No more acid rain.
Or so the theory goes.
Not everyone, of course, is ready to buy in just yet. A man-on-the-street interview conducted this week by the Salt Lake Tribune found more than a little skepticism among the masses.
“It’s probably just another Utah mistake,” is how janitor Ed Townsend summed things up.
The ominous possibility of his results being disproved are not lost on Pons, whose reputation for solid research is well established in chemistry circles. He said he is confident that his and Fleischmann’s findings are valid.
“I may be crazy,” he said, “but I’m not stupid.”
