Word: fusion
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...FUROR over cold fusion began on March 23, as chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann shocked the scientific world with the claim that they had beaten the physicists at their own game. Other scientists were cautious, but Dan Rather dived in headfirst. He led off the CBS Evening News that night with a fusion report, gushing about "what may be a tremendous scientific advance." Only a week later, physicist Steven Jones of Brigham Young University announced that he too had been producing cold fusion independently, generating neutrons but not heat. On April 1, two Hungarian scientists said that they...
...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...
Ronald R. Parker, the director of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center and a member of Petrasso's research team, said at a news conference Monday that no neutrons or gamma rays could have been detected in the Pons-Fleischmann experiment...