Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [92]
Science is a peer-reviewed journal. But it is also a magazine. And magazines, especially those that run advertisements and classifieds, are always trying to boost their circulation. Peer-reviewed journals like to publish provocative and spectacular results in their pages to get extra attention. Sometimes this leads to bad science; even the best peer-reviewed journals occasionally publish substandard manuscripts in their pages. (Nature’s letters section, for example, is notorious for occasionally publishing attention-grabbing but dubious research.) The editor who received the bubble fusion manuscript might have been influenced by the spectacular nature of the claims, but at the same time, I don’t think that he (or other editors at Science) were consciously gaming the peer-review system to accept a manuscript that its reviewers had clearly rejected.
Though I have never gotten my hands on them, I believe that the reviews of Taleyarkhan’s paper were mixed—skeptical and admiring at the same time—and that there was enough innovation in the experiment’s technique that the editor in charge felt that the reviews were sufficiently positive to merit publication. However, even today, I have to shrug my shoulders when asked what happened behind the scenes during Taleyarkhan’s peer review. Frankly, when the bubble fusion frenzy diminished, I was relieved.
The story continued to simmer in the background. In July 2002, I covered an article by Suslick that appeared in Nature. Suslick and a colleague had used fluorescent dyes to measure the by-products of sonoluminescence in water and compared them to theorists’ expectations. “They’re saying, ‘We understand what’s going on inside the bubble,’ and if this is what you believe the science is, you should be suspicious of the Taleyarkhan paper,” Crum told me. (I wasn’t able to reach Taleyarkhan for comment by deadline, unfortunately.) After my article ran, Putterman dropped me a note saying that I was taking the theoretical work too seriously. I didn’t agree entirely, but the point was valid if a little odd. He seemed not to want to dilute the direct criticism of Taleyarkhan’s Science experiment with less-direct criticism from a theoretical perspective.
Taleyarkhan had also been busy. Oak Ridge had included him on a team of scientists assembled to attempt an experiment that would end the controversy once and for all, but the Department of Energy refused to pony up the necessary money. In 2003, Taleyarkhan quit his post at Oak Ridge in favor of a named chair in Purdue University’s School of Nuclear Engineering. In 2004, he published a paper in Physical Review E, a high-level peer-reviewed physics journal, that seemed to confirm his original findings. I didn’t think it added much to the debate, so I didn’t cover it, despite an overheated press release from Purdue:
EVIDENCE BUBBLES OVER TO SUPPORT TABLETOP NUCLEAR FUSION DEVICE
Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive “tabletop” device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions. . . .
... Whereas data from the previous experiment had roughly a one in 100 chance of being attributed to some phenomena other than nuclear fusion, the new, more precise results represent more like a one in a trillion chance of being wrong, Taleyarkhan said.
The New York Times covered the paper, as did a few other outlets, but it didn’t spark a huge amount of discussion, even though Crum told the Times that the new work was “much better” than what had appeared in Science. Nor did another confirming paper, written by Adam Butt and Yiban Xu, that appeared in a lesser journal, Nuclear Engineering and Design, raise any eyebrows. In this case, Purdue’s press release stressed the independence of the new work:
PURDUE FINDINGS SUPPORT EARLIER NUCLEAR FUSION EXPERIMENTS
Researchers at Purdue University have new evidence supporting