Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [88]
I found a fusion expert at Livermore, Mike Moran, who had also done sonoluminescence—with deuterated water, no less—and I asked him what he thought of the paper. “The paper’s kind of a patchwork, technically, and each of the patches has a hole in it,” he told me, and pointed out a number of damning flaws that I hadn’t considered. Taleyarkhan’s experiment seemed to be producing some tritium, and the tritium production disappeared when the sound-wave generator wasn’t operating. Moran pointed out that this disappearance was a problem. A deuterated solution that had been irradiated by neutrons should show an increase in tritium levels whether or not the sound-wave generator—which collapsed the bubbles to ignite fusion—was working. Even without the fusion reactions, some of those neutrons would strike deuteriums and stick, creating tritium. In Taleyarkhan’s experiment, this was not the case; the control experiment with deuterated acetone and no sound-wave generator showed no increase in tritium. “If he’s really right, it should have shown up,” Moran said. “It’s an inconsistency in the data.”
I was convinced. Taleyarkhan was wrong: bubble fusion was a fiction. And because of the spurious result, a scientific drama was playing out before my eyes. The officials at Oak Ridge felt that the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper was damning, and they were hoping to avoid embarrassment. Garwin and Happer were trying to prevent another cold-fusion controversy, and Kennedy was trying to preserve the integrity of the peer-review process. Rumors were flying, and they were getting nastier and more paranoid by the minute. Everybody was getting increasingly annoyed with everyone else.
I got a note from Happer on Friday, March 1. He relayed part of a message from an unnamed colleague (not from Princeton or Oak Ridge) who was telling people of rumors that I had been “calling around asking about activities surrounding the publication of the article, not the ‘science’ in the article.” That message continued:
I don’t want to get anyone upset about this, but it does tend to verify the rumors we have heard about Don Kennedy, the current Science editor and former Stanford President, wanting to go after Princeton people for opposing the publication of the research paper in its original form.
The story had just gotten harder. The allegations were absurd—Kennedy had not influenced me at all, so I could hardly be his attack dog. However, it would be impossible to get honest opinions from physicists who believed that I was preparing a hatchet job at the behest of Don Kennedy. Later in the day, Happer sent a final note:
Be careful what you write and remember:
“The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.
Nor all thy piety, nor all thy wit,
Can call it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
I had been Omar Khayyamed.
Happer need not have reminded me. Of course I was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the situation. People were quite likely to get their first impression about bubble fusion from my article at the front of the magazine. I was skeptical, and I wanted that skepticism to come through, but at the same time I wanted to make sure that everybody’s view was represented fairly: the researchers, the editors, and the skeptics. In my mind, the whole bubble fusion controversy was fueled by these three parties’ tragic mutual incomprehension.
The bubble fusion story was about more than a scientific paper. It had become a story about the way science is done—and how the scientific peer-review process sometimes fails. The original ending to my piece grimly emphasized the point:
Taleyarkhan and his team, in good faith, submitted their paper to peer review and passed. Science magazine subjected the paper to scrutiny in accordance