Word: fleischmann
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Little more than a month ago, they were just two chemists, toiling in virtual anonymity. But B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann came last week to Washington as heroes, visionaries and scientific superstars. With a mob of reporters following along, the thermodynamic duo marched onto Capitol Hill to tell Congress how their simple tabletop experiment had generated fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun. Displaying slides filled with complex equations, wielding electronic pointers and pulling a mockup of their apparatus from a plastic shopping bag, the bespectacled researchers mesmerized the members of the House Committee on Science, Space...
...Congress had better wait a while before it starts pouring taxpayers' & money into Utah's test tubes. Even as Pons and Fleischmann stirred excitement on Capitol Hill, evidence was mounting that their form of fusion is probably an illusion. More and more scientists were openly scoffing at the chemists' claim that they had caused deuterium ions, which are commonly found in seawater, to fuse to form helium, liberating large amounts of heat. Physicists have never been able to achieve such a sustained reaction, even briefly, without subjecting deuterium to the kind of extreme temperature and pressure found inside...
While no one has proved conclusively that Pons and Fleischmann are wrong, it seems likely that they jumped to a hasty conclusion based on incomplete research. Scientists in Japan and Switzerland announced that their own tests had convinced them the original work was flawed. An attempt by the Harwell Laboratory in Britain to confirm the discovery has also produced nothing, even though Fleischmann himself checked the experiments...
...Equally offensive to many scientists is the fact that Pons and Fleischmann have steadfastly refused to disclose important details of their work that would enable others to duplicate it. Though they eventually published an account of their experiments in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Interfacial Electrochemistry, a highly technical Swiss periodical, the paper was too sketchy to be truly enlightening. Pons has argued repeatedly that his critics who are getting negative results do not know how to run the experiment, but he does not show them precisely what they are doing wrong. Declares Keith Thomassen, a physicist who heads...
...Pons being so cagey? Perhaps because the discovery he and Fleischmann claim to have made could be worth a fortune. Keeping some of the secrets to themselves could serve to protect their financial interests and those of the University of Utah, which has already filed five patent applications, with more to come. Pons insists, though, that he has reached an agreement with Los Alamos National Laboratory to help its scientists replicate his cold-fusion experiments...