Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [69]
Throughout April, the pro-cold-fusion groups had the momentum. Though MIT researchers had reported that they were unable to replicate the experiments in mid-April, there were the confirmatory results on the other side: Jones, Georgia Tech’s neutrons, and Texas A&M’s heat. When Pons spoke at a hastily cobbled-together special session at the American Chemical Society meeting on April 12, the mood was enthusiastic. The crowd was extremely sympathetic, if for no other reason than the hope that fellowchemists would succeed where physicists had failed. Physicists had spent years trying to harness the power of fusion, noted the American Chemical Society’s president in his introduction to Pons’s presentation. “Now it appears that chemists may have come to the rescue,” he said, triggering applause and laughter. But Pons’s presentation generated serious doubts in the audience. Most troubling was when he fielded questions about his control experiments.
If Pons and Fleischmann were actually seeing fusion in a test tube, they should have been able to show that the effect was not due to a quirk in their apparatus. To do this, they needed to run a control experiment—one that was almost identical to the fusion cell, but subtly different in a way that would prevent fusion from occurring. Only then could they prove that fusion was really responsible for the excess heat and other effects they were seeing. In the Pons and Fleischmann case, the obvious control experiment was to run an identical experiment with ordinary water rather than heavy, deuterium-laden water. If deuterium-deuterium fusion was responsible for the excess heat, getting rid of the deuterium and replacing it with ordinary hydrogen should end the fusion and turn the heating off. They then could be assured that the heat had something to do with the deuterium in the beaker. Doing this was absolutely necessary if Pons and Fleischmann were to prove to other scientists that they were not deluding themselves.
Indeed, this sort of control experiment is what budding scientists are taught to do in freshman science classes, and everybody expected it from such established scientists as Pons and Fleischmann—not to have run one would seem absurd. But when questioned about why Pons had not published any control experiments, his reply was cryptic. “We do not get the total blank experiment that we expected,” he said. Was he really implying that fusion occurred in the absence of deuterium? This seemed ridiculous even if you accepted that a miracle occurred inside the palladium cell.
At the very least, the scientific community wanted to see the results of those control experiments, but neither the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry paper nor the one that Pons and Fleischmann submitted to Nature had any sign of such a control. “How is this astounding oversight to be explained to students. . . . And how should the neglect be explained to the world at large?” asked John Maddox, the editor of Nature. This was poor science at best, although it was beginning to look much worse than that.
After Nature received the twin manuscripts from Pons and Fleischmann and Jones, the journal sent them out for peer review. The reviewers made their suggestions for changes and additional work, and these were sent back to the authors. Jones complied with the reviewers’ requests, but Pons and Fleischmann refused to do so, claiming they were too busy with other “urgent work.” Though Nature emphasized that this did not make the Pons-Fleischmann paper any less believable than Jones’s, it was still a deep blow to the team’s credibility. Many physicists were beginning to smell a rat, and the rhetoric grew more heated.
The press ratcheted up the rhetoric, too. The Wall Street Journal had been enthusiastic about cold fusion since the very beginning. Its