Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [67]
Pons and Fleischmann had held their press conference before publishing their data and their methods. This was very unusual. Scientists communicate through scientific presentations and papers, not through press releases and press conferences. On the relatively rare occasions that a scientific result is important enough to merit a press event, it is usually held at the same moment that the data are revealed to the scientific community through a paper or in a presentation. With the cold-fusion announcement, the paper was missing. No data were available, and scientists had only the scantest details about how Pons and Fleischmann performed their experiment.
Physicists and chemists around the world were frantic; without any data, they had little way to judge whether Pons and Fleischmann were going to solve the world’s energy crisis—or whether they were merely full of it. The suspense would last for months.
In the first few days after the press conference, the news seemed good for the two chemists. The press soon learned about Jones’s work, and while Jones was much less bold in claiming to generate energy, he, too, was claiming to see fusion in palladium. It appeared to be an outside confirmation of the Pons and Fleischmann claim. No longer could cold fusion be considered the delusion of a single laboratory. As other labs rushed to replicate the experiments, news began to filter in about other confirmations. By early April, researchers at Texas A&M were seeing excess heat in palladium cells; Georgia Tech was seeing neutrons. The University of Washington was seeing tritium. These reports all seemed to provide solid support for cold fusion.
Privately, though, Pons and Fleischmann were getting bad news. Two days before the press conference, Fleischmann learned that even the hypersensitive neutron detector at Harwell wasn’t picking up anything. There was no trace of the trillions and trillions of neutrons that should have been flowing from the palladium. Fleischmann apparently explained the discrepancy away, noting that a number of cells that he and Pons had built didn’t work; perhaps Harwell was using a defunct cell. It was not a convincing explanation, but it would have to do. But worse news was to come, news that was harder to dismiss.
Four days after the press conference, Pons and Fleischmann began to reveal details of the experiments to some of their colleagues. Fleischmann visited the Harwell lab and gave a seminar on cold fusion. The room was packed with scientists, including some very esteemed ones who had been working with neutrons and gamma rays for years. When Fleischmann showed his gamma-ray measurements to the Harwell crowd, they were shocked. A typical gamma-ray spectrum is a bumpy graph that shows a series of peaks and troughs at various energies, reflecting natural background sources of gamma radiation (such as the decay of radioactive elements). Gamma rays from deuterium should have occurred at 2.22 MeV, right between a gentle peak caused by the decay of radioactive bismuth at 2.20 MeV and a much larger one caused by the decay of radioactive thallium at 2.61 MeV. Instead, Fleischmann showed a ratty little plot that displayed only a single peak, without any nearby landmarks to confirm what the peak really was. Worse yet, Fleischmann was claiming that he was seeing gamma rays that had 2.5 MeV of energy, not the 2.22 MeV that a fusion neutron should emit when it strikes a tub of water.57 The peak was in entirely the wrong place. The director of Harwell turned to Fleischmann and said, simply, “It’s wrong.” Fleischmann wilted. The next day, physicists at the University of Utah—who had