Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [61]
In 1989, Fleischmann was a well-respected English chemist. He had been a key player in the field of electrochemistry, the study of chemical reactions that occur because of the influence of electric currents. He had made his name, in part, by discovering a useful physical effect that nobody had predicted—or, at first, believed. In the early 1970s, he used lasers to detect the presence of a minute amount of a chemical on a piece of silver, even though conventional wisdom said that his results were impossible. The chemical should have been all but undetectable by the technique he used. But Fleischmann was correct; he had done the seemingly impossible. He had unwittingly discovered an effect that would be called surface-enhanced Raman scattering, a phenomenon that is now used in a variety of sensitive chemical detectors. Conventional wisdom was wrong and Fleischmann was right.
The scientific community soon rewarded Fleischmann for his discovery. In the mid-1980s, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor that Britain bestows upon its scientists. By the late 1980s, his reputation made him welcome at scientific institutions around the world. He spent most of his time hopping between laboratories at his home university in Southampton, the Harwell laboratory (of ZETA fame), and a lab at the University of Utah.
Stanley Pons was the chair of the University of Utah’s chemistry department, and the two had a long history together. Fleischmann had taken the younger Pons under his wing in the mid-1970s when Pons was at Southampton. Long after Pons moved back to the States the two kept working together. Fleischmann, the elder statesman, and Pons, the eager young experimentalist, made a good team, producing an enormous amount of research. Pons was particularly prolific. By the late 1980s, he was publishing several dozen papers per year. This was a huge output, and it could be argued that the frantic pace led to careless work. Indeed, over the years, Pons and Fleischmann had published some papers that seemed ludicrous—such as one that involved highly unlikely reactions of nonreactive gases—but the two still maintained a good reputation. This is part of the reason that cold fusion got so much attention. Pons and Fleischmann were established scientists; they were not no-name amateurs like Ronald Richter had been. So when they announced their cold-fusion results in 1989, even skeptical physicists took the claim seriously.
The cold-fusion experiment was deceptively simple. At the heart of each “reactor” was a rod or a sheet made of palladium. Palladium is a whitish metal that shares numerous properties with platinum and nickel. Oddly, it is able to soak up enormous volumes of hydrogen—the tiny hydrogen atoms nestle between the atoms of palladium—so researchers had been studying the metal in hopes of coming up with a method for storing hydrogen in fuel cells.
Pons and Fleischmann had long been intrigued by this hydrogen-sponging behavior. They mused about it—talking while driving across Texas, talking while hiking along a canyon—wondering aloud about what was happening to the hydrogen that was crammed inside the palladium. Perhaps the hydrogens were very crowded in the small spaces between the palladium atoms. Perhaps those spaces were so crowded that the hydrogen atoms were bumping into each other with great force. Perhaps, if the hydrogen was replaced with deuterium... It was a crazy idea, but it just might work. If the pressures inside a palladium cage were high enough, they might just induce fusion in a way that a laser cage or a magnet cage could not. Sitting in Pons’s kitchen, the two devised an experiment to discover whether palladium fusion was possible. No law of nature said it was impossible to induce fusion inside a metal cage. It was worth a try, anyhow.
At first, they spent their own money, about $100,000 for the first crude experiments. “Stan and I thought this experiment was so stupid we financed it ourselves,” Fleischmann