Word: fusion
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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...
...Brigham Young University, located just 50 miles away. Although the U is the state-supported university, Utah's majority Mormon population identifies far more strongly with church-run Brigham Young. It was at least partly because a Brigham Young physicist named Steven Jones was nearing an announcement on cold fusion too that Pons and Fleischmann called their surprise press conference. They had been urged to go public by University of Utah administrators, who were apparently fearful that archrivals at Brigham Young would steal the fusion spotlight. The U has had chronic money troubles recently, and an influx of fusion-research...
...chemical reaction." After the accident, Pons called Fleischmann, who had returned to England. Fleischmann responded to the momentous news with an admonition: "We'd better not talk on the phone." Pons says they ultimately spent about $100,000 of their own money to pursue what they were convinced was fusion...
...Pons and Fleischmann were focusing much of their attention on the quest for cold fusion. But they were not alone. At Brigham Young, a team headed by physicist Steven Jones had been working on a similar experiment for at least two years. Jones had also found evidence of fusion, but did not get the excess heat production that Pons and Fleischmann were observing. The two groups were evidently unaware of each other until last September, when Jones was asked to review a Pons-Fleischmann grant application. To his surprise, Jones says, he realized that he and the Utah researchers were...
...race with Jones appears to have forced Pons and Fleischmann to go public long before they were ready. Their paper on cold fusion is considered less -- far less -- than rigorous. "Every great discovery has had plenty of skeptics," notes Richard Muller, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, "but I can't find any great discovery of the past 50 years that was published with a bad paper. If a freshman physics or chemistry major had done it, they would have flunked." Says Robert G. Sachs, former director of ! Argonne National Laboratory: "It doesn't meet the kind of standards...