Perpetual Motion It Isn’t : TOO HOT TO HANDLE: The Race for Cold Fusion, <i> By Frank Close (Princeton University Press: $24.95; 366 pp.)</i>

From the very beginning, cold fusion sounded too good to be true. In March of 1989, two chemists at the University of Utah announced that they had achieved the energy equivalent of alchemy. By running a current through a beaker full of what is known as heavy water, they claimed to have created a physical cell that generated more energy than it consumed.

The announcement was hailed as the discovery of the century, as a triumph of “small science” over big. It promised a cheap and clean source for global energy needs, relief for a polluted planet--even respite from the geopolitical chore of liberating dubious democracies to assure supplies of foreign oil. Reporters chased the scientists as if they were rock stars; patents were hastily filed, and the state of Utah promptly ponied up $4.5 million toward a National Cold Fusion Institute. All they had to do was to confirm the initial claims.

The unraveling of those claims forms the heart of “Too Hot to Handle” by Frank Close, a respected theoretical physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the author of several books about physics. It is a fascinating tale of scientific misadventure that produced what the author calls “the most bizarre 500 days in the history of modern science.” In Close’s telling, cold fusion was indeed too good to be true.

The allure of fusion, hot or cold, has a long and distinguished history, attracting such certified intellects as Edward Teller and Andrei Sakharov. The idea, simply put, is to force two atoms together, usually hydrogen’s “heavy” cousin deuterium, so that the two atomic nuclei fuse. In the process, energy in the form of heat is generated.

Uncontrolled fusion results in a thermonuclear explosion, but if the reaction can be controlled, it promises a sustained source of energy. In one form or another, fusion accounts for the heat of the sun, the destructiveness of nuclear arsenals and multimillion-dollar budgets given to laboratories trying to achieve “hot fusion,” in which temperatures as high as 250 million degrees are created in the laboratory to force those reluctant atoms to fuse. Word that fusion could occur at room temperature sparked justifiable frenzy throughout the world.

At the center of the drama were two chemists, Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England (who consented to an interview with Close) and B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah (who apparently did not). Fleischmann comes across as a witty and erudite scientist of spotless reputation, a member of Britain’s Royal Society. Pons took a rather more unorthodox route to his 15 minutes of academic fame. Born in North Carolina, he attended graduate school in chemistry at the University of Michigan, but dropped out before completing his Ph.D., and then worked as the manager of a family restaurant for about seven years before returning to academia, where he ultimately became chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah.

Both Pons and Fleischmann enjoyed reputations as careful and creative scientists, so when they announced that they had achieved cold fusion, most members of the scientific community presumed they had done their homework and performed the requisite checks. The record unearthed by Close shows they had not.

They had dabbled in cold-fusion experiments without conspicuous success until 1988, when they began to detect a curious excess of heat. At roughly the same time, Pons and Fleischmann became aware that Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University, had discovered very slight nuclear evidence of cold fusion.

In the best tradition of scientific openness, Jones offered to share information with his Utah colleagues. Pons and Fleischman, however, accused him of stealing their idea, and then University of Utah officials elbowed in, urging Jones to cancel an invited talk about his cold-fusion results and brokering an awkward truce in which both teams of scientists would meet at the Federal Express office in Salt Lake City on March 24, 1989, and send their manuscripts together to the journal Nature. Without warning Jones ahead of time, the University of Utah then pressured Pons and Fleischmann to hold a press conference on March 23 to obtain patent priority.

With the press conference, the work hit the global airwaves before it had received the most cursory vetting. As “Too Hot to Handle” makes clear, the scientific press conference can also become a form of scientific self-entrapment: Pons and Fleischmann became enamored of the fame, wedded to a shaky thesis, blind to weaknesses in their argument. The ensuing furor brought discredit upon the university, the researchers, cold fusion and science in general.

The flaws were easy to find. Chemical and nuclear reactions, like financial ledgers, must have balanced energy books, and when so momentous a claim as cold fusion was announced, scientific accountants throughout the world immediately began to audit the Utah experiment. If heat is created by fusion, for example, physical laws demand certain amounts of neutrons, tritium and helium to turn up as well. Even as Pons and Fleischmann were lionized at meetings, the initial audits failed to find these other traces in the right amounts. True, researchers at Texas A&M;, Georgia Tech and the University of Washington initially reported evidence of cold fusion, but most researchers had difficulty balancing accounts.

When another scientist later asked the Utah researchers if they had performed a simple (and crucial) control experiment with ordinary water, Fleischmann replied, “I’m not prepared to answer that question.” Shockingly evasive, that response sent a chill through the entire scientific community.

And still the story grew curiouser and curiouser. Pons and Fleischmann refused to disclose details about the experiment, so resourceful scientists at Caltech and MIT re-created cold-fusion cells on the basis of TV images and diagrams published in newspapers. They found nothing. Texas A&M;, Georgia Tech and Washington recanted their confirmations. Nature asked Pons and Fleischmann to revise their manuscript; Pons’ lame reply was that he was too busy.

Meanwhile, scientists throughout the world monitored and gossiped about the unfolding drama on an electronic bulletin board, a kind of postmodern Greek chorus commenting upon the impending fall of the two protagonists. Occasional news reports resurrect the idea, but the cold-fusion claims of Pons and Fleischmann, Close concludes, were “based more on enthusiasm than on well-controlled science.”

It is a riveting, complex and important story. Close does a workmanlike job of recounting how the saga unfolded, and where the protagonists fouled up. But one never feels the touch of a master storyteller at work, nor of language rising to the occasion of a terrific tale.

There is a disjointed feel to the narrative, with irksome repetitions (we are told three times that Caltech’s Kellogg lab is named after the cereal magnate). The story is marked by good scientific explanations, but would have benefited even more from better organization, sharper reporting and more psychological insight.

Close relies on Who’s Who for personal details about Pons and Fleischmann. We never really get a sense of who they are, and why they behaved so contrarily to the well-established mores of their profession.

With the recent travails of David Baltimore and colleagues coming on the heels of cold fusion, the public might easily view science as a better refuge than politics for scoundrels. The underlying message of “Too Hot to Handle,” however, is quite the opposite. From the March 23 press conference, when Pons and Fleischmann stunned the world, to the May 1 meeting of the American Physical Society, when critics poked large and ultimately fatal holes in the cold-fusion story, it took a mere five or six weeks to get to the bottom of the affair. (If politicians were similarly dedicated to the hasty resolution of important disputes, we would have read April Glaspie’s memo from Baghdad months ago).

But truth came at considerable cost to the community: Tremendous expense and countless man-hours were lost debunking work flawed in ways that would be obvious to any well-trained graduate students. As Close reveals, Pons and Fleischmann didn’t do the necessary controls; didn’t know the literature; didn’t consult more knowledgeable colleagues before going public; and, when the story began to collapse, responded with a defensiveness that can only be termed perverse.

Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis remarked at one point in this sorry affair that the only universities to confirm cold fusion were ones that had winning football teams. Even that claim doesn’t hold up: Caltech had a winning record in 1989. Lewis took a lot of flack for the remark, but the NIH, NSF, DOE and other government funding agencies could do worse than adopt the same kind of sanctions that the NCAA doles out to football teams.

If scientific teams announced results at press conferences before the results have undergone the refereeing process of a journal, or if they faced serious peer scrutiny, and those results turned out to be false, funding levels could be cut, scholarships curtailed and no TV crews allowed on campus to report the latest breakthrough that sounds too good to be true. We would have very few sequels, I suspect, to cold fusion.