Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [86]
I began making discreet inquiries.68 On the sonoluminescence end, I called Crum and struck pay dirt. (As it turned out, all three of the big names in sonoluminescence—Crum, Putterman, and Suslick—had been reviewers.) I got the distinct impression that the sonoluminescence people were impressed by Taleyarkhan’s technique, if a bit skeptical about his team’s conclusions. Crum, at the very least, seemed particularly interested in Taleyarkhan’s method of creating large bubbles with a beam of neutrons and thought it might open some new opportunities for research. (“I thought, doggone! I’m depressed I hadn’t done that experiment,” Crum told me. “It’s a remarkable result, and I would like very much for this to be true.”) So the sonoluminescence end of the experiment seemed relatively solid, at least from my limited reporting.
By that time, the editors had given me more detailed neutron data from Taleyarkhan’s lab. The new information didn’t assuage my doubts. I was no expert at interpreting such data, but they didn’t look quite right. They were muddy; the shape of the peaks in the graph didn’t appear the way I expected them to. These were just my gut instincts, but they emphasized my need to find a neutron expert.
When the time came for my interview with Taleyarkhan, I found him open and friendly. He was happy to tell me all about the research. I confirmed that he was, quite naturally, enthusiastic about the quality of the results—including the neutrons he was detecting. However, no matter how confident Taleyarkhan was, he was not going to be the person who could assure me about the quality of the research. I still had not found a neutron expert who had already seen the paper, especially since I was still supposed to be very discreet. That problem was about to be made moot.
I had sensed that the editors at Science were getting increasingly tense. By the twenty-sixth, I had heard rumors in the building that somebody was trying to pressure the journal to reject the Taleyarkhan paper, and that Science’s editor in chief, Don Kennedy, was hopping mad. I didn’t know anything more for certain until the morning of February 27, when Coontz passed me a cryptic note. He told me I had to call Princeton’s Will Happer and IBM’s Dick Garwin.
Happer and Garwin were legendary figures in the community. They were the big guns of fusion (and of nuclear weapons). Garwin had helped design Ivy Mike; Happer was a former head of the government’s JASON panel. Both had been at the top of the scientific hierarchy for decades and had been involved in debunking cold fusion. They weren’t reviewers of the manuscript—I was pretty certain of that—but clearly they had seen it. And they apparently had some very strong opinions that they expressed to Don Kennedy.69
I didn’t know what Happer and Garwin said, but I knew that Kennedy was furious. He felt that outsiders were trying to disrupt the peer-review process and derail a paper that had already been accepted for publication. “There was certainly pressure from Oak Ridge to delay, if not to kill, the paper,” Kennedy told me when I interviewed him. “I’m annoyed at the intervention, I’m annoyed at the assumptions that non-authors had the authority to exercise constraints on the publication and telling us we couldn’t publish the paper—which they did.”
I called Happer and began to piece together what was going on. (Garwin was in China at the time but I soon got his side of the story, too.) Someone—I never found out for sure who it was—had sent Garwin and Happer each a copy of the Taleyarkhan manuscript and a copy of the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper. Both then e-mailed Kennedy. Garwin was harsh and succinct:
I understand there has been some discussion as to whether Science , having accepted the paper, should nevertheless not print it. I certainly don’t want to enter into such a discussion with you.
But I do want to tell you that I have read both papers carefully, and that I think the odds are extremely high that this “discovery” is simply error and incompetence.
So I caution you to mute the natural