Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [91]
In the same notice, the press office told of the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper and offered to provide it to reporters, as well as a response by Taleyarkhan’s team. (Oddly enough, Taleyarkhan’s team looked through the raw data provided by Shapira and Saltmarsh and claimed to see evidence of neutrons that the two were ignoring.)
The situation had already reached a boiling point. By 1:30 PM on Monday, the embargo was blown. The press office lifted all restrictions on using the articles and begged, once more, that journalists write a balanced story.
“Here we go. . . . Fasten your seatbelts,” one editor told me. It was all over the Internet in seconds. My article was being made available to reporters as well, and I started getting phone calls from television producers inviting me to talk on the air about bubble fusion.72
The press coverage ran the gamut from optimistic and credulous (“Fusion ‘Breakthrough’ Heralds Cleaner Energy,” trumpeted London’s Guardian) to pessimistic and weary (“Here we go again; Table-top fusion,” sighed the Economist). Most were in the middle. My impression was that television reporters (as usual) were more keen on bubble fusion than their print counterparts, but few went overboard. After an intense burst of interest for a week or so, the media frenzy began to calm down. But an undercurrent of bad feeling remained within the science community.
I knew that Science would be vulnerable to attack because of the bubble fusion paper, but I was surprised by the source of the most damning criticism. A week after the story broke, three of the reviewers of the paper—Putterman, Crum, and William Moss, a sonoluminescence theorist at Livermore—told the Washington Post that Science had published the Taleyarkhan paper over their objections:
“I reviewed the paper twice, I rejected it twice,” said William Moss, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
“I told Science you can’t publish it because it’s not right,” said Lawrence Crum, a physicist with the Applied Physics Lab of the University of Washington at Seattle.
“They say it was subject to stringent peer review, but does that mean it passed peer review?” asked Seth Putterman, a physicist with the University of California at Los Angeles, who also rejected the article.
Now this—this surprised me. I had been so busy looking for the neutrons that I didn’t spend a lot of time with sonoluminescence physicists. And what I heard from them had been complimentary, if cautious. (After all, Crum had even used the word “doggone” when describing the beauty of Taleyarkhan’s idea!) Shortly after the Washington Post story, Ken Suslick, too, chimed in. In the beginning of April, Putterman, Suslick, and Crum wrote a short criticism of the Taleyarkhan paper, arguing that it had been “unready for publication” and suffered from “substandard experimental techniques.”
The public criticism was not coming from fusion scientists, but sonoluminescence people,73 and from those I thought were reasonably supportive of Taleyarkhan’s technique. When I had interviewed Crum, and he admitted that he was a reviewer, he seemed positive enough that it didn’t occur to me to ask whether he suggested rejecting the paper. I had completely missed it. The three reviewers were also heaping criticism on Science’s review process. Later in the year, Putterman challengedScience to publish the positive reviews: “Somewhere out there is a positive report from someone,” he told Nature, Science magazine’s main rival. “Science should publish that report because then we’ll see what kind of information they went on to overrule four negative reviewers.” Of course, Don Kennedy refused. “We maintain our end of the confidentiality bargain about peer review, so I can’t discuss the process specifically, except to say that the positive reviews outweighed the negative ones. Why else should we publish the paper?”
Did Science overrule the virulent objections of its reviewers and deliberately publish a bad story? Were the sonoluminescence