Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [81]
But like cold fusion, the bubble fusion researchers believed their work could lead to an unlimited source of energy. And like Pons and Fleischmann, the bubble fusion scientists quickly came under attack by some of the leading fusion physicists in the nation. Even before their paper had been published in Science, the bubble fusion scientists were labeled as incompetent. It got worse after publication. Increasingly isolated, they were forced toward the fringe, and before long they were fighting accusations of scientific misconduct and a fraud investigation that led all the way to Capitol Hill. History had repeated itself.
The bubble fusion imbroglio was a twisted reflection of the cold-fusion affair. The second time around, the tale would be a tragedy as well as a farce. Researchers, peer reviewers, editors, journalists, press officers, and all the other players in the drama were caught in a colossal web of mutual misunderstanding. It was a story of good intentions gone wrong, of paranoia and mistrust, and of hubris that led to the downfall of a scientist.
When the bubble fusion story broke in 2002, I was a reporter for Science, ground zero for the controversy.
Science is famous because it is arguably the premier peer-reviewed scientific journal in the United States. For many scientists, a publication in it (or its British rival, Nature) would be considered a major coup, perhaps even the crowning achievement in an average scientific career. Researchers from around the world submit manuscripts to Science, and it is an enormous task to examine the submissions and select those worth publishing.
I had nothing to do with the peer-reviewed section of Science. I worked for the news pages at the front of the magazine. News reporters at Science are deliberately isolated from the peer-reviewed section. We weren’t told about manuscripts in the pipeline, or about the status of a paper undergoing peer review. We weren’t even allowed to know who the peer reviewers of a given manuscript were.67 So I was quite surprised when, on February 5, 2002, my editor, Robert Coontz, e-mailed me a paper entitled “Nuclear Emissions during Acoustic Cavitation.” It had already been through the peer-review process, but it wasn’t an ordinary manuscript. “Here’s a Science paper that’s likely to be very controversial,” Coontz wrote. “First task is to decide whether we want to cover it.” Within a few seconds, I knew it was going to be explosive.
The manuscript was couched in the typical cold, technical language of the scientific paper, but its authors, a team led by Rusi Taleyarkhan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were making a claim that seemed eerily reminiscent of cold fusion. They claimed to have induced fusion reactions on a tabletop using a process that might lead to energy production. More important, they did it in an ingenious, and seemingly plausible, way. They did it with a technique linked to a mysterious phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.
As early as the 1930s, scientists had discovered a bizarre method to convert sound into light. If you take a tub of liquid and bombard it with sound waves in the correct manner, the tub begins to generate tiny little bubbles that glow with a faint blue light. This phenomenon is not perfectly understood, but scientists are pretty sure they know what is going on, at least in gross terms.
If you have ever belly flopped off a diving board, you know that a liquid like water doesn’t always behave quite like a fluid. Hit it hard enough and fast enough, faster than the water can flow out of your way, and it feels almost like concrete. It behaves more like a solid than like a liquid. This is more than a mere metaphor. Under certain circumstances—if you hit a liquid in the right way—it will “crack” just as a solid would. The liquid ruptures, creating tiny vacuum-filled bubbles that instantly