Word: fusion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 and Technology with an account of how their device...
What would it take, they were asked, to make that dream a reality? Money from Congress, of course. University of Utah President Chase Peterson, who was right there at the scientists' side, suggested that $25 million would be a nice sum to help his school set up a fusion research center. Some of the Congressmen appeared eager to oblige. "Today," rhapsodized Robert Roe, a New Jersey Democrat, "we may be poised on the threshold of a new era. It is possible that we may be witnessing the cold-fusion revolution...
...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...
...phenomenon of science by press conference disturbed many researchers. Said Moshe Gai, a Yale physicist and a member of the Yale- Brookhaven collaboration: "I am dissatisfied and somewhat disappointed with some of my fellow scientists who have done things too much in a hurry." Charles C. Baker, director of fusion research at Argonne National Laboratory, was blunter: "Calling press conferences and making claims of results without having a well-prepared technical report is not the way for a good, professional scientist to function...
...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 one of the fusion-research programs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: "The hard, uncompromising way in which we do our business is that when you make a claim, you present the facts on which you base that claim...