Fusion Flap Proved an Elementary Axiom: Glitter Isn’t Gold
Cold fusion is just about as dead as the phlogiston theory of fire and Lysenko’s political genetics; even its “discoverers” admitted in Los Angeles this week that their work failed a critical test.
Since March 23, hundreds of physicists and chemists have chased the chimera of cold fusion from laboratory to laboratory. It has been an orgiastic explosion of research, and a demonstration for graduate students of what it takes to do a conclusive experiment. What it shouldn’t have been is necessary.
As soon as the news broke, most scientists gave long odds that the remarkable results of B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann would wind up in some scientific waste can or other. Even so, the stakes were so high that the slimmest possibility that the Utah results were correct demanded careful examination. Not only was a Nobel Prize in the balance; so was a significant alteration in the energy economy of the Earth and billions of dollars. It became a lottery with a $100-million jackpot, and, despite the odds, the payoff was so big that it seemed worth risking a buck or two. For the University of Utah, it was very nearly like winning a lottery; its representatives have already asked for $25 million from the federal government.
But from the moment the first pictures came up on television, my “doubt alarm” was howling as loud as an ambulance siren at two in the morning. It was not triggered by professional jealousy between physicists (my fraternity) and chemists (that of Pons and Fleischmann), nor was it set off by an unwillingness to rethink the problems of fusion. Theories come and go with fair regularity, and every experimentalist dreams of discovering something that will send the theorists back to their blackboards.
The first clue that activated my doubt alarm was the calling of a press conference, because scientists don’t normally pass out news releases of amazing discoveries before their work has been evaluated by their colleagues. Those who advertise first and publish later are assumed to have something more at stake than scientific priority or even patent rights. Indeed, the suspicion is that those who publish first in the press don’t want other scientists to look closely until sudden fame bestows at least a few benefits.
Science works by institutionalizing skepticism. There is no room in good science for uncritical acceptance of any results, let alone those that portend a revolution. The skeptical scientist needs to know what his colleagues have really done, not what they claim to have found. Only with full disclosure of how research was done can its results be tested.
Nevertheless, Pons and Fleischmann clearly withheld much that was important about their work both from their press conference and from their first brief paper. Given the potential significance of their work, every detail was important, perhaps even down to the brand of thermometer they used, never mind how it was placed. Another reason for the doubt alarm.
Finally, it is not a scientist’s duty to be convinced of new results. When a great discovery is claimed, it is the job of the discoverer to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that he wasn’t fooled by nature. Nature, indeed, is a tricky character, and seems in this case to have slipped in some glitches to lend excitement to the chase after cold fusion.
Heat alone is not enough to prove cold fusion; rare but understood chemical reactions can easily account for what Pons and Fleischmann actually saw. But there are many nuclear “signatures” that could have confirmed that fusion was taking place--copious production of neutrons, production of helium gas, flashes of gamma rays. Strangely, at their press conferences Pons and Fleischmann reported no credible detection of any of them. A simple control experiment would have checked to see if fusion occurred when ordinary water was used, but the University of Utah scientists didn’t think to report such a test, even after having worked for five years on their project.
The lack of any nuclear signatures turned my doubt alarm up to its highest level. Indeed, if the experimenters had produced enough fusion to account for the heat production they claimed to have seen, they probably would have been in a hospital with acute radiation sickness.
The cold fusion episode bears more than a passing resemblance to the claims for perpetual motion machines and mental telepathy. Don’t look too closely, or the effect will go away; look closely enough and you might find out that the hand is really not quicker than the eye. When reputable scientists play in that league, it is detrimental to the whole scientific enterprise, because the public builds up hopes only to find out that science can deceive as well as benefit.
It is good to see hard evidence finally emerging to debunk cold fusion, testimony that will hold up in the court of scientific publication, but it is no surprise. The signs that the discovery of fusion in a bottle was based on an error were apparent the moment the news broke. They only required confirmation in the lab, just as does any other scientific finding.
