Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [73]
When Pons and Fleischmann quietly packed their bags and left for France, where a Japanese consortium had set up a cold-fusion research facility, they left behind a small community of true believers. These cold-fusion aficionados supported and encouraged each other, secure in the belief that a revolutionary idea was being crushed by the scientific establishment. There had been a miscarriage of science, they thought. Pons and Fleischmann had been run out of town by the very hot-fusion physicists who were going to lose their funding because of the chemists’ discovery.
Pons and Fleischmann continued their research long after the mainstream of science had dismissed cold fusion entirely and had come to consider the whole affair a tremendous embarrassment. The two went their separate ways in the mid-1990s, still insisting they were right, that they had seen excess energy in their palladium cells. The Japanese gave up on cold fusion in 1997, after having spent tens of millions of dollars without any concrete results. The following year, nearly a decade after the scientific community turned its back on the idea, the University of Utah stopped fighting for cold-fusion patents. They were more than $1 million in the hole for lawyer’s fees.
Steven Jones, too, was driven to the fringe. Though he kept his post at Brigham Young University, his research got increasingly bizarre. A devout Mormon, he tried to prove that Jesus Christ had visited Mesoamerica (he thought that marks on the hands of Mayan gods were evidence that Christ, with his stigmata, was their inspiration). Then, in 2006, he came out with a study that purported to prove that the World Trade Center had been demolished by explosives inside the building, not by the jets that struck from the outside. BYU initiated a review of the research, and Jones retired from the university shortly thereafter.
If Pons, Fleischmann, and Jones had been the only ones who supported cold fusion, the idea would have long since passed out of the public consciousness. But some serious-sounding scientists at some serious-sounding institutions were convinced that there had to be something to the cold-fusion claims. (Some modern-day cold-fusion work is being done by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, at a few navy laboratories, and even at MIT.) Some mysterious events also lent credence to the cold-fusion conspiracy theories. In 1992, a researcher was killed in an explosion while performing a cold-fusion experiment, and in 2004, Mallove, the most outspoken proponent of the idea, was found on his driveway, beaten to death.
The cold-fusion movement also drew strength from the press. Reporters seem genetically predisposed to take the side of the underdog, and the cold-fusion-versus-big-science story certainly had one. Some journalists were true believers, and others just were offended by mainstream science’s treatment of the cold-fusion researchers. Their gripes came out as a slow and steady drumbeat. “These folks need a fair hearing,” said ABC News science correspondent Michael Guillen in 1994. In 1998, Wired’s Charles Platt suggested that ignoring new cold-fusion research might be “a colossal conspiracy of denial.” The Wall Street Journal returned to its cold-fusion roots in 2003 with a column by the esteemed science journalist Sharon Begley: “Cold fusion today is a prime example of pathological science, but not because its adherents are delusional.... The real pathology,” she wrote, “is the breakdown of the normal channels of scientific