Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [71]
Yet even as the criticism mounted, the researchers betrayed little doubt about their work. On April 26, Pons and Fleischmann, along with Chase Peterson, Steven Jones, and other cold-fusion backers, testified in front of a congressional committee. At stake was a bid to get the federal government to chip in $25 million to cold-fusion research. Pons said he and Fleischmann were “sure as sure can be” that they had achieved fusion, and Fleischmann said he had confirmation of their results from other groups. Even though an MIT physicist urged caution, dubbing the cold-fusion fiasco as “The Case of the Missing Controls,” the warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. Or no ears. The physicist Robert Park noted that “By the time the hearings got around to the skeptics, only two committee members remained, the television cameras were gone.”
The physics community was in an uproar. Pons and Fleischmann were too busy to revise their paper for Nature, too busy to respond to requests for clarification and information from skeptics, too busy to attend the upcoming American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Baltimore, but not too busy to hype their claims to Congress in hopes of grabbing $25 million of federal pork. The researchers were making ever more bizarre claims (such as the helium-4 detection) and getting increasingly defensive. In the view of most physicists, the pair had been evasive, self-contradictory, and perhaps less than honest. The mood in the physics community was poisonous. At the Baltimore meeting on May 1, it all erupted.
Neither Pons nor Fleischmann showed up, but Jones, who was not earning the same ire as the other two, was there. Jones was less of a pariah because he had revised his paper for Nature, had reported on control experiments with water, and was making much more modest claims than Pons and Fleischmann. And of course, he was appearing before a group of his peers, defending his research. Jones kicked off the session on cold fusion and received a “polite but generally sceptical reception,” according to a Nature reporter in attendance. Pons and Fleischmann were the main targets. First, Steve Koonin, a fusion scientist at the California Institute of Technology, rubbished the claims of cold fusion—and then he attacked the scientists who made them. “We’re suffering from the incompetence and delusions of Professors Pons and Fleischmann,” he told the applauding audience. Nathan Lewis, a Caltech chemist, then took up where Koonin left off. He accused Pons and Fleischmann of not stirring the liquid in the cells, allowing hot liquid to accumulate in spots and throwing off their heat calculations. “We asked Pons if he stirred,” said Lewis. “No answer.” In his rapid-fire presentation, Lewis devastated the Pons and Fleischmann claims. If there was any cold fusion at all—an unlikely possibility—it certainly wasn’t the dramatic stuff that the Utah chemists were seeing.
It was a mortal blow. To most mainstream scientists, cold fusion was dead. The New York Times’s obituary was a piece entitled “Physicists Debunk Claim of a New Kind of Fusion.” Even the Wall Street Journal admitted that the session had been a “devastating” attack on the Utah team’s credibility, but was less willing to give up hope for cold fusion. (Over the next few weeks, the stream of hopeful news—new confirmations and evidence in favor of cold fusion—continued gracing the pages of the Journal.) But to most scientists, cold fusion was well and truly dead, even though, as physicist Park noted, the corpse probably would “continue to twitch for a while.” (This was, as it turns out, an understatement.) It was dead to most politicians, too. White House chief of staff John Sununu abruptly cancelled a planned meeting with Pons and Fleischmann on May 4.
The outlook for cold fusion got progressively worse as skeptics piled on, and Pons and Fleischmann got more reclusive and more distant. They failed to attend a cold-fusion meeting later in May. They refused to release an analysis of helium in their palladium rods