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By Root 1399 0

said at the press conference. But by scientific standards, their experimental setup was not that expensive, so it was a worthwhile risk to try, even on their own dime. Sometime in 1984, at least according to their own timeline, they took a chunk of palladium and set it in heavy water, water whose two hydrogen atoms are replaced with deuterium. To the water they added a salt containing lithium and deuterium. Then they stuck in a platinum wire and hooked it and the palladium up to a battery. They hoped that over time the current would cause deuterium to seep into the palladium, where the deuteriums would then begin to fuse. But when Pons and Fleischmann started the experiments, nothing happened. Then, one day, they cranked up the juice and left for the evening. Fleischmann told the Wall Street Journal what happened next:

Sometime during the night the palladium cube suddenly heated up to the point where some of it vaporized, blowing the apparatus apart, damaging a laboratory hood and burning the floor. “It was a nice mess,” Mr. Pons said. A check of the laboratory the next day with a radiation counter indicated radioactivity levels three times higher than the normal background levels, apparently the result of a sudden spray of neutrons.52

Pons and Fleischmann took this as a clear sign of fusion. Only a fusion reaction, they reasoned, could vaporize a hunk of metal like that. Mere chemistry could not explain the heat, so that meant something else was going on.

Their crazy hunch had paid off. Pons and Fleischmann felt they had made a momentous discovery. As they continued their research, they tried to keep it secret, letting only a few people into their confidence. But by the late 1980s, they were running out of money, so they started applying for outside funding. The first place Pons turned to was the Office of Naval Research; the ONR was already funding him to the tune of $300,000 per year for other work. But the ONR passed. Next up was the Department of Energy. Its Division of Advanced Energy Projects—a group that gives seed money to highly speculative research—was interested. But to award Pons and Fleischmann a grant, the department had to get the application peer reviewed; it had to send the chemists’ proposal to other scientists to get their opinions. (Scientific grant proposals, like scientific papers, tend to get accepted only after peer review.) One of the peers who reviewed Pons and Fleischmann’s proposal was a physicist at Brigham Young University, Steven Jones. As soon as Jones got a copy, all hell broke loose.

Jones was a natural choice for a reviewer. He had long been interested in fusion, particularly fusion under unusual conditions. In the late 1970s, while working at a Department of Energy facility in Idaho, he became intrigued by a bizarre phenomenon discovered by Luis Alvarez—the Oppenheimer critic—in 1956. Alvarez was using a device known as a bubble chamber to study particle interactions; when a particle zipped through the chamber, it would leave a trail of bubbles behind, which allowed physicists to see how particles behaved. He discovered some curious tracks—they had gaps in them—that didn’t seem to make sense. He and his group visited Edward Teller’s home to talk about the phenomenon, and after an “interesting discussion” Alvarez and Teller realized that the mysterious tracks were the sign of nuclear fusion between a hydrogen and a deuterium.

How could this be? Alvarez’s bubble chamber was extremely chilly—not far from absolute zero, in fact. How could the cold, slow-moving deuterium and hydrogen possibly have enough energy to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse? The secret was a subatomic particle known as the muon. The muon is almost exactly like the electron, but it is some two hundred times heavier than its sibling. Like the electron, it carries a negative charge. And like the electron, it can be captured by a proton to make a hydrogen atom. But this weird muon-hydrogen object is considerably different from ordinary hydrogen. It is more massive—and it is tinier. The muon’s extra