Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [74]
Mainstream physicists saw it differently, of course. Despite the fact that Pons and Fleischmann were claiming something extraordinary—ridiculous, even—the scientific community had scrutinized their claims. They found the Utah group’s work sloppy at best, and systematically demolished the chemists’ claims. Cold-fusion advocates had spent millions of dollars researching the phenomenon and still did not have a device that could reliably heat a cup of water for tea. The burden of proof, as always in science, is on the people who claim extraordinary things. It is their responsibility to perform an experiment so good that it forces the scientific community to abandon its prior beliefs.
This may be the scientific attitude, but it comes across as terribly arrogant, and that served to increase the power of the cold-fusion lobby. By 2004, the pressure had grown to the point that the Department of Energy felt it necessary to review whether cold fusion merited renewed funding. (The term cold fusion had been dropped in favor of the less-pejorative low-energy nuclear reactions.) The conclusions were much the same as they had been a decade and a half earlier. Yet the mere existence of the review was an indication of the power of the cold-fusion lobby. And the more that people tried to stomp on cold-fusion enthusiasts, the stronger the movement became.
The lure of cold fusion and the promise of unlimited, free energy is, itself, a source of power to be reckoned with. Patent examiner Thomas Valone has been under its spell for more than a decade. In 1998, after having worked at the patent office for a few years, he broadcast a plea for cold-fusion aficionados to join him in his line of work, according to Science magazine. “Valone called for ‘all able-bodied free energy technologists’ to ‘infiltrate’ the Patent Office”—presumably to benefit like-minded cold-fusion and free-energy enthusiasts seeking patents. Valone then attempted to organize what was to be called the First International Conference on Free Energy, which was to be held at the State Department. Mainstream physicists were appalled, including the American Physical Society’s Robert Park, who featured the conference in his acerbic weekly What’s New newsletter. “The speakers list for CoFE is certainly open minded; topics include: assisted nuclear reactions (a.k.a. cold fusion), sonoluminesence (a.k.a. cold fusion), hydrogen technologies (a.k.a. cold fusion), tabletop nuclear transformations (a.k.a. cold fusion),” Park wrote, noting that the conference was to be held under the “auspices of the U.S. State Department in the Dean Acheson Auditorium.” An embarrassed State Department booted the conference, but the meeting survived. Within a few weeks it was renamed the First International Conference on Future Energy, and it had apparently found another home. Valone billed the event as being held “In cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce”—the department that runs the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Commerce kicked the conference to the curb. Valone, too.
In May 1999, a week after Valone’s conference took place in a Bethesda hotel, his supervisors started a process to remove him from his job, alleging, among other things, that he had misrepresented the Commerce Department’s role in the conference. By the end of August, he was fired—but Valone filed a grievance. He felt he was being unfairly persecuted for his beliefs.
When the case was heard, the arbitrator had harsh words for the patent office and its reliance on hearsay, and failure to follow proper procedure. But the harshest criticism went to the physicists who had attacked Valone. It is easy to understand why Park and his American Physical Society colleagues went after cold fusion, he wrote:
The federal government’s budget pie for research and development in the areas of theoretical physics and chemistry is limited and, by and large, only traditional physicists represented by organizations like the