Claims of Cold Fusion in Utah Tantalize Scientists at Caltech
Cold fusion may turn out to be, as one East Coast physicist described it, the greatest discovery since fire. Or it could ultimately be dismissed as just another widely ballyhooed dud.
But regardless of the final judgment, at Caltech it will long be remembered as the source of a phenomenal burst of intellectual energy, sweeping chemists and physicists into an intense, sometimes giddy two-month search for the truth.
“It’s like an incredible detective story,” said electrochemist Nathan Lewis, the point man in Caltech’s interdisciplinary effort to replicate the dramatic findings announced two months ago by the University of Utah.
Lewis’ critique of the Utah findings at a meeting of physicists in Baltimore three weeks ago has generally been regarded as among the most devastating in a hail of critical studies. “We could find no evidence for anything other than conventional chemistry,” Lewis said at the time.
Now that the roar of amazement is dying down, the Caltech team members are telling the story of how they launched into their own passionate quest for cold fusion, using newspaper articles and videotapes of news programs as their source material, jury-rigging experimental machines with borrowed equipment and working around the clock in their laboratories.
Momentous, If True
Consider the stakes here, Lewis and others said recently. If it’s true, as claimed by B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England, that fusion can be achieved at room temperatures using little more than sea water and an electric current, then the solution to the world’s energy problems could be at hand.
The Caltech scientists sputter to sum it all up. “The claim that you can make energy out of really simple things--it’s one of the most amazing things to be recorded in decades,” said graduate student Bruce Tufts.
Here, then, was the scene when Lewis got to work on March 24, the day after the cold fusion claims were announced.
About 20 of his students and postdoctoral researchers were in the lab on the second floor of the Noyes Chemistry Building, fiddling with palladium electrodes and beakers full of “heavy water,” a solution of deuterium oxide.
“If nothing else,” said chemist-researcher Michael Sailor, one of the tinkerers, “I wanted to be able to say that the day after it was announced, I went and did it in the lab.”
What drove them? “Curiosity,” said Lewis, 33, a fast-talking, energetic man who is liable to blurt out to a telephone caller: “I’ve only got a minute, so let’s hustle.”
“We were just curious,” he said, dismissing a contention from Pons and Fleischmann supporters that schools, such as Caltech, had set out to debunk their work. “There’s no credit in coming in second. It wasn’t that. It was just curiosity.”
Physicists’ Huddle
Two blocks away, in the basement of the Physics Building, physics professor Charles Barnes was huddling with researchers Stephen Kellogg and T. R. Wang about what kind of a contribution they could make in verifying the phenomenon.
“We knew we had one of the best neutron detectors in the world and an absolutely state-of-the-art gamma ray detector,” said Barnes, 68, who has been at Caltech for 36 years, “and we were wondering if we could do something to contribute.”
All anybody knew, Lewis said, was that Pons and Fleischmann had built a device similar to a homemade battery, using palladium and platinum electrodes in a solution of deuterium oxide. (Actually about 10% heavier than water, deuterium oxide is a kind of water in which the hydrogen atom is replaced by deuterium, which has an extra neutron.) Run an electric current through the electrodes, said Pons and Fleischmann, and, under the right conditions, you will achieve fusion.
That would mean that, as with any atomic reaction, more energy would come out than went in. It would also mean fusion of subatomic nuclei--the same process that occurs on the surface of the sun, at temperatures measured in millions of degrees. Then telltale byproducts, such as extra neutrons, gamma rays and the hydrogen isotope tritium, could be detected.
Lewis’ band of researchers propped copies of the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, with accounts of the Pons-Fleischmann findings, on their lab tables and tried various approaches to the experiment. In the week or so after the announcement, some spent 24-hour days in the laboratory.
Secrecy an Obstacle
It was time-consuming research. Because of the Utah pair’s secrecy about some aspects of their work, the Caltech chemists had to do a lot of guesswork, Lewis said . “What was the size of the flask? Where were the electrodes? Were they sticking out of the flask? And that does make a difference.”
Lewis is still incensed at the secrecy. “Maybe there were patent considerations,” he said. “Maybe their lawyers told them not to talk.” But keeping elements of the experiment under wraps was a “glitch in the normal process” of the scientific method, the first commandment of which, Lewis said, is “Thou shalt share.”
Both Barnes and Lewis, operating independently, realized they needed some interdisciplinary help.
“They knew gamma rays,” said Lewis of his physics colleagues, “but not much about chemistry. We wouldn’t know a neutron if it came out and bit us.”
“I was just at the point of calling some senior chemistry professors to ask them who I should talk to about this,” Barnes added, “when some of Nate’s post-docs came barreling over, asking, ‘Who in this lab can measure neutrons?’ ”
Research Mementos
The bulletin board in the Chemistry Department is plastered with snapshots from those heady early days, just after the March 23 announcement by Pons and Fleischmann, when the Caltech chemistry and physics labs became the focus of an extraordinary collective research effort.
One shows a pair of perplexed-looking researchers, fiddling with the knobs of the potentiostat, a laboratory power supplier. “Oh my God! She’s gonna blow!” says the handwritten caption. Another shows graduate students and researchers, surrounded by lab equipment, gawking at the camera, with the caption: “Ay, Captain, she has gone critical.”
Someone has tacked up a clipping with a picture of a Texas scientist holding a beaker, such as the one Pons and Fleischmann used. The jokester has drawn in a comic strip voice bubble, showing the scientist saying, “ . . . and it prevents pregnancy too!”
The most dramatic moment of the entire effort, most of the researchers say, occurred in the physics lab, two days after the Pons-Fleischmann announcement. “It was whiz-bang stuff,” said Tufts euphorically. As several dozen professors, researchers and graduate students looked on, an electrical current was sent through a beaker of heavy water, perched in a narrow niche in the lab’s neutron detector.
Then they watched as the detector, a telephone-booth-sized device with plastic pads, which literally “catch” neutrons, scanned the beaker. Some of the younger men wondered aloud whether they should be wearing “lead underpants.”
It was not an idle worry, Barnes said. “It occurred to me that, if the neutron flux were really big, maybe we shouldn’t have all those people in the lab. I thought maybe we should have set it up for remote operation.”
Low Neutron Flux
But the tension dissipated quickly, Barnes said. “It only took a few moments to realize that the neutron flux was not at a level that was in any way hazardous,” he said.
The experiments have been going on ever since--about 50 of them, between the physics and chemistry labs. The neutron detector and a lead-sheathed gamma ray detector continue to search for signs of fusion. Chemistry researcher Gordon Miskelly’s arrangement of heat measuring devices, complete with a motor from a model boat powering a device to keep it stirring, continues to perk away in the chemistry lab.
So far, said Lewis, nothing. No “discovery.” He compares the original Pons-Fleischmann claims to a hypothetical claim that the law of gravity can be suspended. “A shoe will fall if we drop it,” he said. “That’s the law of gravity, which we believe to be true. But suppose someone says that he can make the shoe just stay there in the air--but only in his lab.”
Claims Pared Down
He said that the Utah claims, at first so extravagant as to defy the imagination, are gradually being pared down.
“You start from, ‘Oh, gravity doesn’t work,’ then you get to, ‘It doesn’t work for a millitenth of a second,’ ” he said. “What you really mean is that, when you threw the shoe up there, it took a little longer to fall down than you expected.”
Lewis and Barnes--neither of whom is quite willing yet to dismiss Pons and Fleischmann’s cold fusion findings--and their researchers are preparing a formal paper, which will be published sometime in the next few weeks.
Whatever the outcome, most agreed, the effort was worth it.
