Vindication Comes to Fusion’s Silent Man : While Others Got Publicity, Brigham Young Physicist Won Scientific Support
Steven Jones is the other fusion scientist, the one who stood offstage as the drama involving B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann unfolded in the last two months.
The Brigham Young University physicist has gone virtually unnoticed as his competitors at the nearby University of Utah grabbed the attention--for better or worse--after their startling claim that they had achieved nuclear fusion in a flask, thereby solving the world’s energy problems.
But now Jones has stepped quietly into the spotlight. And last week was his time of vindication.
As Pons and Fleischmann have weathered a torrent of criticism over their increasingly shaky claims, Jones’ finding of much lower rates of fusion has gained new support. Four groups of researchers from Italy and one from the Los Alamos National Laboratory reported at a symposium here that they had confirmed his findings, bringing the spotlight back in his direction.
Happy About Support
Jones said that he was “very happy” about the new support, particularly the results from Los Alamos. “There’s no question in my mind that we are seeing a small but very significant scientific effect.”
Jones is happy now, but most of this year has been rather painful for him. The low-keyed 40-year-old physicist has been falsely accused of stealing ideas and of sloppy experimental work. In the rush for scientific acclaim, his once-friendly relationship with his two competitors has degenerated into a series of misunderstandings and angry phone calls.
He has traveled the world defending his research and his claims of priority, and at nearly every stop he has been treated as an intruder trying to ride the coattails of Pons, of the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of the University of Southhampton in England. Jones says the pace of the last few months has cost him 13 pounds.
Through it all, he has kept his composure, distanced himself from the wilder claims of his colleagues, and generally impressed other researchers with his levelheadedness and persistence. Now, whether cold fusion is eventually proved or disproved, some people believe that he is the only Utah researcher who will emerge with his reputation intact.
The rivalry between Jones and the Pons-Fleischmann team is widely credited--or blamed--for forcing them to prematurely make their fusion claim two months ago. Pons and Fleischmann announced at a press conference that they had developed a simple technique for producing sustained nuclear fusion at room temperature.
Using a simple cell in which palladium and platinum electrodes were immersed in heavy water (water in which hydrogen had been replaced with deuterium, which has an extra neutron), they said they were able to get out more energy than they were putting in.
An electric field generated by the electrodes, they said, forced deuterium ions into the palladium electrode, where they fused, releasing energy in the process. As evidence that fusion was occurring, they cited the production of neutrons and tritium, both of which are byproducts of fusion. And the excess energy, they said, promised the world a safe, inexpensive source of energy that would relieve society of its dependence on fossil fuels.
In the uproar that has followed their announcement, however, Jones has been largely ignored because in his own experiments he has not made extravagant claims for energy production. In an analogy Jones frequently uses, the energy he is claiming is equivalent to a dollar bill, while that claimed by chemists Pons and Fleischmann is equivalent to the national debt.
Jones’ work was superficially similar to that of Pons and Fleischmann, but he used slightly different materials. He found that this apparatus produced a small number of neutrons when a current was passed through the electrodes--indicating that fusion was occurring.
His results were frequently cited as a confirmation of the Pons-Fleischmann results, even though he was producing less than one-billionth of the energy they were claiming. Positive results from a number of laboratories around the world were also cited as supporting the University of Utah experiment, even though in most of the cases, the researchers were observing the same number of neutrons observed by Jones.
Work of a Decade
Although the public has known about cold fusion for two months, the behind-the-scenes story began early in the 1980s. Jones, who is a dead ringer for Father John Mulcahy of the “MASH” television series, spent most of the decade studying cold fusion triggered by muons, atomic particles about 200 times as large as electrons. He had found that muons were very efficient at producing fusion. Unfortunately, the production of muons is so difficult and expensive, he said, that muon-catalyzed fusion is unlikely to ever be a commercial energy source.
Casting about for other approaches, Jones ultimately reached the same conclusion as Pons and Fleischmann, that electric fields could be used to force deuterium ions into palladium and other metals, where they could undergo fusion. Jones applied to the U.S. Department of Energy for financing and got it in May, 1986.
He learned about Pons’ and Fleischmann’s work in September, 1988, when Ryszard Gajewski of the Department of Energy asked him to referee a grant request from the University of Utah. It is customary for researchers in any given field to serve as referees for grant proposals, helping the funding agencies decide on their merit. That role came to haunt him.
In February, a lawyer for the University of Utah called Jones and, in effect, accused him of stealing Pons’ and Fleischmann’s ideas from their grant proposal. Jones called Gajewski for help, Gajewski called the University of Utah to assure them that Jones was already working in that area, and Pons called Jones and apologized. “I thought we had everything worked out,” Jones said.
But rumors that Jones had stolen the Utah ideas started up again about the time Pons and Fleischmann made their public announcement. One individual even approached Jeffrey Holland, president of BYU, at church to broach the rumor.
“I was really hurt. . . . That was one of the few times in my life that I have cried,” said Jones, who was told of the incident. “I called Stan (Pons) about it, and he hung up on me--although he and Martin eventually called back and apologized again.”
Early in March, the two groups had agreed to submit papers to the British journal Nature simultaneously, even though Pons and Fleischmann had argued that they needed another 18 months of work to confirm their results. Shortly thereafter, to Jones’ surprise, the Utah press conference was called, the day before the papers were to be sent off.
Agreement Denied
He also learned that they had already sent a paper to another journal, contrary to their agreement with him. Various officials at the University of Utah have consistently denied the existence of such an agreement.
Jones’ paper was eventually published, but Pons and Fleischmann withdrew their Nature magazine paper when referees asked for more information. In the same issue of Nature that Jones’ paper appeared, Nature editor John Maddox wrote a scathing editorial accusing both groups of failing to carry out a simple control experiment by performing the same experiment in normal water.
Jones, however, had done the experiment, and it was discussed in the manuscript, but somehow missed by Maddox. “That hurt also,” he said. Nature eventually ran “a very small” retraction, but Maddox never called to apologize.
Since the Pons-Fleischmann press conference in March, Jones’ life has been “a little crazy,” he said. “I’ve been trying to talk whenever I can at scientific meetings,” and he has also been visiting with other scientists to talk about his technique. He estimated that he has been out of town for about 90% of the weekdays since the press conference, “and I’ve lost 13 pounds.”
But so far, he has managed to make it home for every weekend but one--an important consideration, he said, for a devoted family man. Jones has six children ranging in age from 3 to 13, and is clearly distressed by the amount of time he has spent away from them.
Expecting Seventh Child
His wife, Lezlee, is expecting the couple’s seventh child in June and, after one more speaking trip to Hawaii and Japan, “I’m going to stay home for a little while,” he said.
But his travel so far has been very productive. One trip was to Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Fusion, which is located in the middle of a superhighway tunnel through the Gran Sasso Massif, part of the Alps, to shield it from cosmic rays.
On Wednesday, physicist Antonio Bertin of the Gran Sasso laboratory told the fusion conference that he and his colleagues had repeated Jones’ experiments and were obtaining a low level of neutrons, evidence that fusion was occurring. Bertin also reported confirming results from two other Italian labs.
In April, Jones visited Los Alamos to begin another collaboration. Physicists there had been trying unsuccessfully to reproduce the Pons-Fleischmann results for a month and “were getting a little frustrated,” Jones said. When they adopted his approach, however, they saw results in a few days. “I was so relieved we were able to get that accomplished,” Jones said.
Physicist Howard O. Menlove of Los Alamos reported last Wednesday that, in two separate types of experiments, he and his colleagues had seen the same amount of neutrons observed by Jones. It was the first confirmation of cold fusion by a U.S. government laboratory.
Jones cautions that, based on his results, “Cold fusion is hopeless as an energy source.” But he believes that his discovery can solve many scientific mysteries.
Geologists have long known, for example, that emanations from volcanoes contain abnormally high quantities of helium-3, an unusual form of helium that is formed by fusion processes. Above-normal quantities of helium-3 are also found in the air over the regions of Earth where the massive tectonic plates that support the planet’s continents are separating. The source of this helium-3 has not been known.
Jones believes that the helium-3 is produced by cold fusion occurring at the very high pressures encountered at the center of the Earth.
Similarly, astrophysicists have observed that the sun does not emit as many neutrinos as it should if all its energy were produced by conventional fusion. Jones argues that a process similar to cold fusion could be occurring in the cooler areas of the sun’s surface. Cold fusion might be occurring on Jupiter, he said, which would account for the planet’s mysteriously high temperature.
But a lot of work remains, he added. “Now we know that we’ve seen something, we need to ask: What is it? What does it mean?” He concedes that the road will be hard. “Ultimately, we’re after the truth, but sometimes there is quite a gauntlet you have to run to come out with it.”
