Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [85]
Oak Ridge was in a bind. They were about to look foolish. One of their researchers was about to publish what they considered a bad piece of research that would spark a second cold-fusion fiasco. And they were increasingly powerless to stop it. The lab had already given Taleyarkhan permission to seek publication, and Science had already accepted and reviewed the manuscript. Yet Oak Ridge seemed to have an experiment that blew the Taleyarkhan discovery out of the water. They were rapidly running out of options.
Scrapping the paper ceased to be a possibility the moment Taleyarkhan had sent the paper to the journal. However, Oak Ridge’s objections had slowed publication by a few weeks. In that time, the lab moved fast to try to reduce the impending damage. Shapira and Saltmarsh quickly typed up their results in a short report and sent it over to Science, hoping the two papers would be published side by side. The negative report, if accepted, would at least force readers to cast a skeptical eye on the claims of bubble fusion; Oak Ridge wouldn’t look quite so bad when other researchers poked holes in Taleyarkhan’s work. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option, either. Any scientific manuscript in Science had to be peer reviewed, and the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper was no exception. There was no way that a new paper could be sent to reviewers, receive comments, and be revised in time to make the March 8 issue. (And it was becoming increasingly clear that holding beyond March 8 would be impossible; word of Taleyarkhan’s paper was beginning to leak out.) Oak Ridge had no options left. The world would soon learn about bubble fusion, even though Shapira and Saltmarsh had shown that it was almost certainly a fiction.
I was back on the case on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 20. The Science editors had decided to go ahead and publish the article on March 8, and while formal approval had not yet come through from Oak Ridge, they had assurances that it would come shortly. (And it did.) I was given the green light to begin reporting again, but I was warned to tread carefully to avoid leaks. I immediately e-mailed Taleyarkhan again and set up an interview. That part was easy. The hard part was figuring whom else to talk to.
I needed to speak to outside researchers, people not in Taleyarkhan’s research group. Only then would I get a reasonably objective opinion on the quality of the paper. At this stage, I couldn’t show the manuscript to anyone who hadn’t yet seen it; I couldn’t be responsible for a leak this far ahead of publication. So I had to figure out who had already seen the paper—I had to find the paper’s reviewers.
Nobody at Science would tell me who they were. The reviewers are kept confidential, even from the reporters who work for the same magazine. But I could guess. The Taleyarkhan paper crossed two fairly established disciplines, sonoluminescence and fusion. Just a few groups had been studying sonoluminescence for years. Lawrence Crum led one at the University of Washington, Seth Putterman led another at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Ken Suslick ran a third at the University of Illinois. I was fairly certain that at least one of these scientists had been a reviewer. The fusion side of the paper was tougher. It was a bigger field, with many more researchers. I figured that the most likely candidates were those who knew about the nitty-gritty of neutron detection. If anyone would be able to bolster or tear down Taleyarkhan’s work, it would be a neutron expert. In fact, if I were to pick reviewers for the manuscript, I would choose some of the physicists who had dissected the cold-fusion papers. They would certainly approach the paper with a skeptical eye, and if they were convinced, the paper would automatically get a huge amount