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By Root 1397 0

reporter, Jerry Bishop, had written a page-1 story covering the Pons and Fleischmann press conference in Utah, and the Journal had become the go-to place for optimistic news about cold-fusion developments. When criticism of Pons and Fleischmann began to bubble through the press, especially the liberal press, the Journal struck back. In April, the New Republic wrote a piece blasting the scientists for releasing the experimental results “in a way that maximized publicity but defied the conventions that are supposed to ensure the reliability of scientific information.” The Wall Street Journal replied with a caustic editorial linking criticism of cold fusion with other complaints of East Coast liberals: “The pace of scientific advance is sometimes hard to discern amid the unending wail about trade deficits, food chemicals, the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, animal rights or political ethics,” it declared. “Even within the scientific enterprise, the creative impulse of a Fleischmann and Pons must contend today with what might be called ‘Academy mentality.’”

The clash between the pro-cold-fusion and anti-cold-fusion camps was becoming an ugly fight. It was also getting more confused by the minute.

The day after Pons’s speech at the American Chemical Society, the researchers at Georgia Tech, who had provided evidence in favor of cold fusion, recanted. They weren’t seeing neutrons after all. They had made an embarrassing mistake: their detector had been picking up temperature fluctuations rather than neutrons. The Texas A&M scientists also backed off their claims a bit; the amount of excess heat they were seeing had dropped dramatically. Excess heat was still evidence in favor of cold fusion, but the change undermined confidence in the A&M results. Then there was the bizarre claim that Pons and Fleischmann had found helium in their palladium electrodes. In mid-April, the Utah chemists told the press—again, without a formal paper supporting their claims—that their cells were producing helium. But they were claiming the production of helium-4, not helium-3.

If deuterium-deuterium fusion is happening, it is producing helium-3 at a quick rate. Since the branch of the reaction

d + d → n + 3He

happens roughly half the time, one helium-3 should be produced for every two fusions that occur. Helium-3, not helium-4. However, once in a long while—once in about ten million fusions—an unusual reaction does occur. Two deuterium nuclei stick together, producing a helium-4 that is quivering with energy. Usually, the helium-4 can’t hold together; either a neutron or a proton pops off. Rarely, though, the helium-4 sheds the excess energy in another way: it emits an enormously energetic gamma ray (with about 24 MeV), and the helium-4 nucleus survives. So the reaction

d + d → 4He

does exist. It is just very rare.

Pons and Fleischmann, backed by the theoretical calculations of two other Utah chemists, were suggesting that this third, rare branch of the deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction had somehow become dominant, suppressing not only the branch that produced tritium but also the branch that produced neutrons. It would explain why the tritium and neutron observations reported thus far were so iffy, and why nobody was spotting helium-3. But physicists weren’t buying it. Not only would suppressing the ordinary mechanisms of deuterium-deuterium fusion in favor of this rare branch require a miracle of sorts (nothing like this had been theorized, much less been seen before), but also scientists could point to numerous cases of researchers’ being fooled by helium-4 in the atmosphere. In fact, there was a notorious case from the 1920s when two German researchers, Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters, convinced themselves that a palladium catalyst was turning hydrogen into helium. Instead, the helium they were detecting was contamination from the atmosphere. The case was so similar to the Pons-Fleischmann episode (down to the type of metal used by the experimenters) that it seemed ridiculous for Pons and Fleischmann to rely heavily on