Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [72]
Michael Salamon, a Utah physicist who had been running a gamma-ray detector in the Pons-Fleischmann lab, was encountering bizarre roadblocks; the only time that the cells were “working” seemed to be when his equipment was off line. When Salamon wrote a manuscript for Nature on his results—entirely negative—Pons’s lawyer threatened legal action. And, according to Hugo Rossi, the dean of the University of Utah’s College of Science, Pons and Fleischmann didn’t cooperate much with the National Cold Fusion Institute, which was established with the $5 million given by the Utah legislature. Speaking about a former Pons postdoc, Rossi explained, “I discovered after awhile that he had instructions from Pons to do nothing [but] set up fake experiments. I discovered this with the help of the assistants who were working for him. [One of them] told me, ‘You know, those tubes are running, and there are wires running from them, but they’re not hooked up to the computer. Data are not being gathered.’” Pons and Fleischmann lurched toward the fringes of science. But even as they faded from sight, their dream did not die entirely.
By the end of May, the mainstream scientific community was convinced that cold fusion was a delusion, and its discoverers, Pons and Fleischmann, were considered either colossally incompetent or patently dishonest. (When the story of the moving gamma-ray peak became widely known, the latter became more and more plausible.) The day after the congressional hearing in April, the Department of Energy asked a panel of scientists (including Koonin) to look into the cold-fusion claims. By the time the draft report came out in July, the verdict was no surprise: there was no convincing evidence for cold fusion. The final report, released in November, was a little more conciliatory, expressing sympathy for “modest support” for well-performed studies to tie up some of the loose ends. There were a lot of them.
Even though Pons and Fleischmann’s own work had been thoroughly debunked, a handful of experimenters still thought they had seen heat or tritium coming from palladium cells. Texas A&M’s John Bockris and Stanford’s Robert Huggins, for example, became staunch supporters of cold fusion based on their labs’ results. And, of course, there was Jones. The scientific community found flaws in all these studies. Jones’s own cells were shown not to be producing neutrons by a team of physicists led by Moshe Gai, a Yale professor. Huggins was criticized at the APS meeting by a fellow Stanford professor, Walter Meyerhof. Bockris’s lab was soon surrounded by intimations of academic fraud, which included spiking cells with tritium from a little bottle. Though the researchers were cleared by a Texas A&M panel, doubts lingered about the quality of their work. This was enough to convince most scientists that cold fusion was not worth any expense of time or effort.
Nevertheless, positive reports from increasingly sketchy research kept dribbling in. These persuaded some scientists, as well as a number of mainstream organizations, including the Electric Power Research Institute and the Stanford Research Institute, that there had to be something to cold fusion. (As late as October 1989, Edward Teller apparently was in favor of funding cold-fusion experiments.) Despite the scorn of most scientists, the research continued to receive money, although it was getting harder to find. University of Utah president Chase Peterson tried to keep the Cold Fusion Institute alive with a $500,000 infusion from his university’s research fund.58 And so the corpse of cold fusion continued to twitch. Part of what kept the cold-fusion dream alive was the sense of outrage over how Pons and Fleischmann had been treated by the physics community. The smackdown in May had had the air of a public lynching. In its wake, the climate in the physics community had turned from skepticism to scorn. Soon, any cold-fusion believer was ridiculed. It was unseemly,