Cold Fusion: Science Fiction or Reality?

The current controversy over cold fusion is a very exciting example of science in progress. Some investigations confirm it; other investigations don’t. There is excitement on one side, denunciation on the other. Is that the way science works? Loud squabbling? Angry accusations and rebuttals?

Sometimes, yes. There have been numerous cases of this sort of thing in the past, and we can outline a few.

Beginning in 1894, American astronomer Percival Lowell examined Mars assiduously at an observatory he built in the Arizona desert. It seemed to him that he saw the surface of Mars covered with thin straight lines, which he interpreted as “canals.” He was convinced that Mars harbored a highly evolved, technologically advanced intelligence that was combating the slow loss of Mars’ water by using the polar icecaps as a source of irrigation.

Lowell wrote books upholding his thesis, and H. G. Wells used Lowell’s observations as an inspiration for his popular science-fiction book, “The War of the Worlds.” The public, excited by the drama, believed in the canals.

However, most astronomers failed to see the canals. The opposition grew stronger and stronger and in 1964, close-up photographs of the Martian surface by a rocket probe settled the matter. There were no canals! Lowell was fooled by markings near the limits of visibility. It was an optical illusion that he wanted strongly to believe, but wishing didn’t make it so.

Another case. Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895 and won worldwide fame and a Nobel Prize. Other physicists longed to make similar discoveries.

In 1903, a French scientist, Rene P. Blondlot, was convinced he had. He reported certain mysterious “N-ray” (N for Nancy, his native city) that were very difficult to detect, but that he managed to see. Others excitedly repeated his experiments and confirmed them, especially in France. Hundreds of papers were churned out about N-rays and all sorts of observations were made as to when N-rays were “liberated” and when they were not.

However, most scientists in Great Britain, Germany and the United States failed to detect the N-rays and there were occasional recriminations based on national prejudice on both sides. An American physicist, Robert W. Wood, visited Blondlot’s laboratory and was shown the procedures. Wood secretly pocketed an essential portion of the detecting device, but the experimenters innocently proceeded to detect the N-rays anyway.

Once Wood reported what he had done, the whole N-ray controversy collapsed. There is no reason to think Blondlot wasn’t sincere. It was just that he wanted so much to make a discovery as important as Roentgen’s that he saw what he wanted to see. However, wishing didn’t make it so.

In 1962, a Soviet physicist, Boris V. Deryagin, reported the existence of “polywater.” This was a new form of water that was found in very thin tubes. The molecules were abnormally close together. Polywater was 1.4 times as dense as ordinary water, and boiled at 500 C. instead of 100 C. It was all very exciting.

Instantly, chemists all over the world began repeating Deryagin’s work and behold, they found polywater too. Perhaps polywater played an important role inside the cell. The excitement was intense.

But then reports filtered out of chemistry laboratories that polywater might be ordinary water that had dissolved silicate out of the glass tubes holding it. In short, polywater might be impure water. Again, there were investigations and, almost at once, the polywater phenomenon collapsed and disappeared. It was another case of excitedly plunging for the dramatic--but wishing didn’t make it so.

However, that isn’t always the case with all dramatic and unbelievable discoveries. In 1938, German physicist Otto Hahn, who had been bombarding uranium with neutrons, decided the uranium atom was breaking in half (uranium fission) but this was so outlandish a notion that he didn’t dare report it. However, his ex-partner, Lise Meitner, in exile in Sweden for the crime of being Jewish, was braver. She reported the possibility and the news was given to Niels Bohr, who was on his way to the United States to attend a scientific conference. He passed it on to American physicists, who instantly repeated the experiments and confirmed the existence of nuclear fission. This time the wild and dramatic notion was true.

Well, now which is it to be for cold fusion? After all, if cold fusion really exists and can be exploited, it would be an enormous gift to all of humanity. Unlimited, clean energy! The will to believe is tremendous. There is the drama of 30 years of highly expensive experiments by physicists failing to achieve fusion, and then two chemists succeeding on a shoestring. How can we help wanting those two to succeed?

However, wishing may not make it so, so we must be cautious.