Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [68]
What was going on? Why was the gamma-ray peak in the wrong place? To all appearances, Fleischmann and Pons dismissed the problem, attributing it to a minor error in calculation. When their paper finally came out in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, the lone peak was sitting in precisely the right spot: 2.22 MeV. Perhaps they told the editors about the “error” and corrected it before it was published. However, Pons and Fleischmann apparently failed to spot one occurrence of the old, incorrect value of 2.5 MeV in the manuscript: in the equation where they describe the interaction between a neutron and a hydrogen atom, they declare that the gamma ray would be at 2.5 MeV, not the 2.22 MeV shown by the spectrum.
The problem of the moving peak wasn’t public yet, though it soon would be. In the days after the press conference, scientists, still hungry for details about the Pons and Fleischmann experiments, were taking desperate measures. Physicists apparently hacked into Pons’s e-mail account looking for clues. One scientist spooked Utah chemists by loitering outside the Pons-Fleischmann lab. A team of plasma physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology resorted to scouring television footage of the lab instruments for data. They succeeded: a broadcast on Utah’s KSL-TV showed the entire gamma-ray spectrum, clearly showing the bismuth and thallium peaks. Using that information, they deduced that Pons and Fleischmann’s peak had to be near 2.5 MeV as originally presented during the seminar at Harwell, not at 2.22 MeV, as reported in the journal article. Furthermore, even without the television footage, the MIT researchers showed that the Pons-Fleischmann peak was the wrong shape—too narrow and without a distinctive shoulder—for one produced by neutron-created gamma rays. It was a devastating critique, and when Pons and Fleischmann responded to the MIT criticisms in June, the peak had somehow moved back to 2.5 MeV. By that time, most mainstream physicists had already decided that cold fusion was bunk.
However, in late March and early April, the question was still open. While the physicists were still trying to figure out precisely what Pons and Fleischmann had done, the scientific and political communities were dividing into believers and nonbelievers. The biggest critics of cold fusion were plasma physicists. These were the people who knew a lot about the difficulty of achieving fusion, and who had learned through painful experience how neutrons can fool you. They were also the people who had the most to lose if cold fusion worked. Cold-fusion supporters began to sense a conspiracy to attack the Pons-Fleischmann discovery. “There is big money in hot fusion, and if we turn out to be right, hot fusion, I guess, goes away,” said the University of Utah president, Chase Peterson. “That represents entire careers, and orthodontia, and college educations for whole families of people that have lived off that dole.” In the eyes of supporters, the critics of cold fusion, largely on the East and West Coasts, threatened with obsolescence, were striking at the discoverers of cold fusion in Utah, in the heartland. The university’s vice president for research, James Brophy, supported this view: “The black hats, such as they were, came from the hot fusion community.... There was certainly an organized campaign to discredit cold fusion based on the possibility of losing funding.”
On the other side, anti-cold-fusion physicists felt that they were simply trying to investigate a very important scientific claim; after all, the whole scientific method relies on the vigilance of the scientific community. Even skeptical fusion scientists, such as Richard Garwin, who helped turn the Teller-Ulam design into a testable bomb, investigated the Pons and Fleischmann claims with an open mind. “Within the next few weeks, experiments will surely show whether cold fusion is taking place; if so it will teach us much besides humility,” he wrote in April