Putting The Heat on Cold Fusion

By Dick Thompson

The spring meeting of the American Physical Society is normally a cool scientific congregation, but last week's gathering of 1,500 physicists in Baltimore was more like an unusually hot celebrity roast. This elite clan convened a special panel to comment on the instant fame of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists who had dared to venture from their field into the private domain of nuclear physicists. Less than six weeks earlier, Pons, of the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of Britain's University of Southampton, claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, at room temperature. Because the experiment produced much more energy than it consumed, said the chemists, it could lead to the development of an almost limitless power source. Physicists were skeptical, but they scurried to their labs to see if the seemingly impossible could be true.

In Baltimore the physicists proclaimed their answer: no way. After weeks of thorough experimentation, researchers from numerous prestigious institutions, including M.I.T., Caltech, Yale and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reported that they had found no evidence of "cold" fusion. The scientists seemed incensed that they had wasted their time trying to replicate an error-filled experiment and chided the University of Utah for requesting a $25 million federal grant based on sloppy research. Said Caltech physicist Steven Koonin: "We are suffering from the incompetence and perhaps the delusions of Professors Pons and Fleischmann." When the nine members of the cold-fusion review panel were asked if they thought the Utah experiment was a dead issue, eight raised their hands. The only holdout was Johann Rafelski of the University of Arizona, who did not support Pons and Fleischmann but said he would nonetheless withhold judgment.

The physicists offered several theories about where the Utah experiments had gone wrong. Pons and Fleischmann claimed that they had caused the nuclei of deuterium atoms, a heavy form of hydrogen, to fuse together to form helium, thus releasing radiation and heat energy. But, the physicists suggested, the radiation detected might have come from radon that was already present in the laboratory's air. The helium reported could also have seeped into the apparatus from the air.

Moreover, the physicists challenged the Utah team's heat measurements, saying they were probably faulty because the solution in the setup was unstirred, the temperature was not uniform and the thermometer was placed in a "hot spot." That conclusion moved Stanford physicist Walter Meyerhof to turn poetic. Said he: "Tens of millions of dollars are at stake, dear sister and brother,/ Because scientists put a thermometer at one place and not another."

The roasting that Pons and Fleischmann took at the Baltimore meeting, which they declined to attend, is not likely to finish the debate over cold fusion. This week one or both of them may present new experimental results at a Los Angeles session of the Electrochemical Society, a gathering of chemists that may be more receptive to the idea of fusion in a jar than the physicists were. The Utah team still enjoys support from groups of researchers at Stanford and Texas A&M, who say they have also produced heat in their own versions of the experiment. Pons continues to insist that other laboratories have failed to duplicate his results because of variations in materials or procedure. But unless Pons and Fleischmann show how the experiment can be replicated, their claims of cold fusion will count for nothing. Observes Arizona's Rafelski: "Science is about knowing. It's not about believing."