Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [83]
Skeptical physicists would only be convinced by a detailed graph showing how many neutrons were detected at what sorts of energies. Taleyarkhan’s paper had a few graphs, but they were far from detailed. The main one only had four points—two for the deuterium experiment and two for the control experiment—telling how many neutrons were detected above and below 2.5 MeV. That wasn’t nearly enough, at least in my opinion. I expected a neutron spectrum to have tens of points, not two. Without that level of detail, I didn’t think that there was enough information to determine whether the experimenters were seeing something real.
I was uneasy. The content of the graph did not rule out the claim of fusion. Taleyarkhan’s team may well have seen neutrons that were drop-dead evidence of fusion. But if they did, I couldn’t tell from the graph. If they had confirmatory data, they were not presenting it in a convincing way. If they didn’t know how to convince other scientists of their claims, I suspected that they didn’t know enough about the field to make such claims in the first place.
That was my initial impression. But as a journalist, I’ve learned that first impressions are very often wrong. In fact, I wanted to be convinced that I had erred in my snap judgment, if for no other reason than I thought it would make a better story if Taleyarkhan was correct. Furthermore, I knew that the manuscript had gone through Science’s peer-review process. The editor who had handled the manuscript—I presumed that it was our physics editor, Ian Osborne—did not laugh it out of the room when he read it. The peer reviewers (whose identities I didn’t know) had also, presumably, vetted the manuscript and found it worthy of publication. This certainly did not ensure that Taleyarkhan and his colleagues were right, but it did theoretically mean that there were no obvious flaws.
I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I wanted to figure out whether bubble fusion was real. If it was, it could be the biggest science news to come around in a long time. I wrote back to Coontz. Of course I wanted to cover the story.
When Coontz first sent me the paper on February 5, he told me of an additional complication. The editors were afraid of an embargo break.
The embargo system is the dirty little secret of science journalism. Over the past few decades, science journalists entered into a compact with peer-reviewed journals like Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine. The journals provide copies of manuscripts to reporters a few days ahead of publication; these journalists, in return, agree not to tell the public about the manuscripts until the embargo expires, usually the evening before the peer-reviewed journal is published. Journalists who break the embargo, publishing ahead of the set time, are threatened with the loss of access to advance manuscripts, putting them at a great disadvantage with respect to their peers who abide by the rules. Nonetheless, some stories are so juicy that reporters can’t resist; word inevitably leaks out before the embargo expires (often the fault of British newspapers, whose reporters are particularly jumpy). The embargo breaks, and it’s a free-for-all.
Bubble fusion was obviously a juicy story, so the slightest word leaking to the press could trigger a media feeding frenzy. It was crucial to the editors that nothing be reported in the newspapers until the final version of the manuscript was ready. If the press started talking about the experiment before the paper was available, it could easily be a repeat of the cold-fusion disaster—science by press conference. It would not be fair to Taleyarkhan and his colleagues, who went through the peer-review process, to open them to accusations of subverting the system. Security had to be extraordinarily tight.
The paper was to be published on February 14. I was asked not to contact