Word: chemisters
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Levi was a professional chemist, manager of a paint factory in Turin until he retired at 58 to write, and so he writes from a scientific perspective and with a scientist's precision. But he was also a humanist, a lover of poetry, and these brief essays demonstrate the remarkable range of his interests, from children's games to the genius of Rabelais to the dissatisfactions of playing chess against a computer to the question of why butterflies are considered beautiful. And his mind is agile. When he discovers that the framework of a crinoline gown in the Kremlin museum...
...that often motivate less intellectually lofty folks, and the peculiar circumstances of this discovery helped ignite a number of long- smoldering resentments. For one thing, fusion and other subatomic phenomena that are usually studied with giant nuclear reactors and particle accelerators have long been the private domain of physicists. Chemists, on the other hand, were more likely to be studying how to make a better laundry detergent, or so physicists seem to think. It is no surprise, then, that the harshest critics of Pons and his dime-store equipment have been physicists. Retorts Pons: "Chemists are supposed to discover...
Still, the cold-fusion combat is not just the physicists vs. the chemists. There is a sense in Salt Lake City that most of Pons' critics are what Utah chemist David Grant calls "the mean bullies from the Eastern establishment." Such snooty folks should remember, he says, that "science is not the domain of one set of colleges or one set of people anymore...
None of the criticisms leveled at Pons and Fleischmann mean that they are necessarily wrong. But the burden of proof remains on them. So far, they have failed to demonstrate convincingly that they have indeed produced a new sort of fusion. And if the two chemists cannot think of any way to explain the excess heat in their experiment without resorting to nuclear reactions, others can. Chemist Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate and himself something of an iconoclast, thinks that when absorbing high concentrations of deuterium, the palladium lattice may become unstable and deteriorate, releasing heat...
Other physicists at the convention supported Petrasso's report. Nathan Lewis, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology, said Monday that his duplications of the original experiment showed no evidence at all of nuclear reactions, even when the parameters of the experiment were changed...