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INTERESTING science happens in extremes of conditions. Near absolute
zero, some materials lose their electrical resistance. At 100 million degrees,
nuclei of atoms overcome their mutual dislike and fuse to form new nuclei,
releasing a massive amount of energy in the process. Persuade these processes
to work at everyday temperatures and you have found your way to paradise
– a Utopian dream of cheap power or limitless energy that is supposed to
ensure eternal human happiness.

It is these dangerous visions that fuelled the frenetic activity following
the discovery of the (relatively) high-temperature superconductors, and,
more recently, led eminent and respected scientists to throw caution to
the wind and tell everybody (and I mean everybody) that they had made the
scientific discovery of the century.

On 23 March, two esteemed electro-chemists, not noted for flights of
fancy, risked their hard-won reputations and held a press conference to
announce that they had found a simple way to induce nuclei to fuse at room
temperature. The benign energy that makes the Sun go round – that arising
from nuclear fusion – could be tamed in a test tube. Such a process could
provide human beings with energy forever.

Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and his former student,
Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, claimed that splitting heavy water,
or deuterium oxide, by passing a current through platinum and palladium
electrodes had produced such an enormity of heat that a nuclear rather than
a chemical process must be responsible. The mechanism they proposed was
that the electrical potential at the palladium cathode had forced deuterium
ions from the heavy water into the crystal lattice of the palladium. The
confined conditions of the lattice were such as to cause deuterium nuclei
to fuse.

The press conference astonished and angered scientists for several reasons.
First, Pons and Fleischmann had bypassed the normal circuit of communicating
new research. That is, writing and submitting for publication a scientific
paper describing experimental conditions and procedure in detail, for the
scrutiny of their peers. Normally, those refereeing the paper ask questions,
which the researchers are obliged to answer before the journal accepts the
paper.

Secondly, Pons and Fleischmann were chemists, so some scientists felt
they had no business straying out of their field of expertise and speculating
about nuclear physics. Not surprisingly, the fusion community was incredulous
that chemists had achieved in a test tube what nuclear physicists had spent
hundreds of millions of pounds attempting, at solar temperatures in gigantic
machines such as JET.

Lastly, perhaps the most alarming aspect of the whole business is that
it soon became clear to nuclear physicists that the experiment raised many
questions which the chemists should have answered before going so spectacularly
public. Evidence that there were nuclear goings-on appeared circumstantial
rather than direct. The chemists seemed to have concentrated on measuring
the heat produced by the reaction rather than measuring parameters, such
as the energy of the neutrons emitted. This would provide incontrovertible
evidence of fusion.

Fleischmann and Pons had investigated just one line of experiment; they
had not carried out a control experiment with ordinary instead of heavy
water. Fusion could not take place in plain water. In fact, when physicists
in virtually every major scientific centre in the world rushed into the
laboratory to repeat the experiment, they soon found that the experiment
was not easily reproducible – to put it mildly.

That has not stopped some research groups from claiming publicly, within
a few days, that they had reproduced the results from Utah. In most cases,
the results do not stand up to close scrutiny. There is the ludicrous case
of one American university claiming positive results one day, only to retract
them a few days later, but then to say that the researchers got the wiring
wrong on the calorimeter (the instrument that measures heat output). So
the first results were right all the time. Surely, this is no way to do
research? David Williams, who is responsible for running tests on cold fusion
at Harwell laboratory, agrees. He is horrified by the indecent haste with
which some research groups have claimed positive results, without repeating
their experiments to check their conclusions.

‘These people are engaging their mouths before they engage their brains,’
he said. Williams says that all the serious research groups – in Britain,
West Germany, France and the US – will say nothing definite until they are
absolutely sure they have meaningful results. That, of course, could take
several months. Derek Beynon of Birmingham University, who is involved in
a joint effort with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, also
believes that the publicity machine has got out of control. In the hopes
of obtaining inside financial information, The Wall Street Journal even
telephoned him for a story about palladium futures.

So why have two senior scientists risked losing their academic integrity
by making what seems to be a premature announcement in public about highly
speculative research? Here, there is an ugly twist to the saga. Part of
the answer lies in another university in the same state as the University
of Utah – Brigham Young University. Here, Steven Jones, a nuclear physicist,
has been studying exotic methods of nuclear fusion for some years. He had,
it seems, independently come up with a similar experiment to that of Pons
and Fleischmann.

When he became aware of their work in 1988, he offered to collaborate.
And, although the two groups made different measurements and obtained results
that are different, Jones says that last month, after a series of discussions,
the two groups agreed to submit papers on their research simultaneously
to the journal Nature, on 24 March.

Jones was deeply shocked when, on the previous day, Pons and Fleischmann
held a press conference in Utah University announcing their results. There
was no mention of Jones’s work. A day later, Jones found out that they had
already submitted a paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry
on 11 March. ‘This was also a great shock to BYU,’ said Jones.

But he was even more hurt when various members of the University of
Utah, including Pons, insinuated that Jones had stolen the chemists’ ideas.
This was supposed to have happened in the previous autumn – September 1988
– when the US Department of Energy (DOE) had asked Jones to review a proposal
that Pons and Fleischmann had submitted.

According to a document that Jones is circulating, Jones had already
described his ideas in a paper published in the Journal of Physics G in
March 1986. The paper provides a theoretical foundation for what Jones calls
piezonuclear fusion, or the inducement of fusion by ‘squeezing’ nuclei together.
Jones’s notebooks (see the extract above) show that he independently thought
of using a metal electrode to confine deuterium atoms, and that his group
built the first electrochemical cell in May 1986.

Jones recommended that the proposal from the University of Utah should
be approved and suggested that the two groups cooperate, because he had
an instrument that was sensitive enough to detect even minute numbers of
neutrons emitted from nuclear fusion. On 6 March 1989, senior officials
and the principal scientists from both universities met. The document says
the two research groups agreed to publish their results simultaneously and
not to make any further comments in public until they had submitted their
papers.

In the event, when Jones learnt of the proposed press conference on
22 March from the DOE, he decided that the agreement had been broken so
he sent his paper to Nature a day earlier. Subsequently, Fleischmann and
Pons also sent in their paper. Jones’s paper was published last week, but
Pons and Fleischmann withdrew their paper after declining to answer referees’
questions because they were too busy with new work.

According to an official at Utah, Jones and Pons are no longer on speaking
terms. But Jones says that Fleischmann has apologised to him privately.
British researchers believe administrators at Utah pressurised Fleischmann
into premature disclosure. He would have preferred to have spent another
18 months working on the project.

Why did this acrimonious situation happen? The answer is probably a
combination of glory and greed. The expectations of BYU and the University
of Utah clearly diverged early on, because of the different results that
the two groups obtained. Jones’s experiment produced a few neutrons just
above the limits of detection. There was no heat and no net energy gain.
A practical fusion device based on his experiment seemed a long way off.
In fact, Jones was really interested in testing ideas about whether fusion
occurred in the centre of the Earth at great pressures. This would account
for the ratios of helium-3 and helium-4 found in rocks and in the gases
from volcanoes.

Pons and Fleischmann’s results, if correct, produced a massive energy
gain, so they looked as if they could form the basis of a useful energy
source. Indeed, if it were possible to carry out cold fusion in this way,
then the world could take advantage of cheap supplies of deuterium from
the sea. There would be little in the way of radioactive waste.

James Brophy, who is the vice-president of research at the University
of Utah, promotes this scenario as the reason for breaking the agreement
with Jones. ‘Cold fusion, if it holds, is clearly going to have a major
impact on society. Sometimes you have more of a responsibility to society
than you do to the scientific community,’ says Brophy. So the excuse was
noble rather than Nobel.

Brophy says that the University of Utah has applied for worldwide patents
in the hopes of obtaining considerable royalties. It could bring immense
benefits to the state of Utah, says Brophy. The Utah state legislature has
promised $5 million from private and public sources if cold fusion proves
to work, and the Office of Naval Research has expanded its programme with
Fleischmann to $300 000. According to Brophy, Fleischmann is now working
on another proposal for submitting to the DOE, worth $2.5 million.

This cocksure confidence of the Utah team has puzzled physicists and
chemists. Most of them are extremely sceptical about the validity of the
research for a very good reason. They cannot get the experiment to work.
This has been reinforced by the apparent sketchiness of Pons and Fleischmann’s
paper. Experimenters grumble that it does not give enough information to
repeat the experiment.

Only one research group – at Stanford University in California – has
obtained results comparable to those of the chemists at Utah. The paper
does not explain how the energy gain was calculated. Theorists criticise
the paper for its vague statements about the underpinning mechanism.

‘Where are the numbers?’ says Thornton Greenland of Harwell’s Theory
Division. So far, there is no real theoretical framework for cold fusion,
only vague ideas, he points out.

Although Fleischmann has suggested that cold fusion implies new physical
phenomena, scientists say that the pertinent physics and chemistry are already
well understood and rule out cold fusion as a source of heat. Jones’s results
could just be explained theoretically but experimentally they are considered
to border the limits of statistical significance. Yet rumours are circulating
within the community that Fleischmann has not told all and is soon to reveal
further tantalising developments. There are hints that work on patenting
the process is moving fast and that there are now corporate interests involved.

It is difficult to reconcile the optimism that underlies the overt economic
opportunism of functionaries at the University of Utah with the bewildered
doubts expressed by the scientific community at large. It is hard to believe
that someone as clever as Fleischmann would have allowed intellectual intransigence
or an overenthusiastic university administration to sway him from the path
of scientific rigour.

If Pons and Fleischmann’s experiment proves to be a storm in a test
tube, their credibility, together with their careers, will have been seriously
damaged. The wide publicity will have caused many research groups to waste
time and diminishing research resources.

On the other hand, whether it turns out to be apocryphal or apocalyptic,
test-tube fusion may have alerted authorities that fund research to the
importance of maintaining nuclear research, and in particular to keeping
money aside for unusual ideas on the basis that one in a hundred might work.
And cold fusion, like warm superconductivity, will have stimulated interdisciplinary
crosstalk between chemists and physicists.