Word: fusion
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Where will it all end? Fusion fever continued to rage throughout the scientific world last week, causing many ordinarily cautious scientists to jabber as though the revolution they hope for had already occurred. Cold fusion, the controversial "discovery" announced last month at the University of Utah, was proclaimed by one researcher to be "perhaps as significant as the invention of the wheel." Another said it "may be the most important discovery since fire." Most scientists are still dubious, especially about claims that the experiment produced four times the energy it consumed, but the prospect of virtually limitless energy has generated...
...experience of a lifetime." The crowd was there to hear chemistry's new superstar, B. Stanley Pons, describe and defend the experiment that had catapulted him and British colleague Martin Fleischmann to instant fame only a few weeks earlier. Pons and Fleischmann claim to have produced controlled nuclear fusion in a jar at room temperature. If Pons, a professor at the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of the University of Southampton in England, are correct, and if the process can be harnessed economically on a large scale, the world's energy problems are over...
Those are big ifs, as evidenced by the preliminary results emerging from dozens of labs in the U.S. and abroad. The data provided new support for the notion that cold fusion is real, but none of the experiments were complete or totally convincing. Researchers at Texas A&M University said they too had produced excess energy in the form of heat, though less than in the original experiment. Scientists at Georgia Tech, using a similar device, said they had detected excess neutrons, subatomic particles that are a normal by-product of fusion -- although they later announced that their experiment...
...University of Washington, two graduate students reported finding tritium, another fusion waste product, in their version of the experiment. A scientist in Moscow asserted that he too had found evidence of cold fusion. And M.I.T. filed for patents based on a researcher's theoretical model of how fusion in a jar might work...
That theory, however, is much doubted by many physicists who have labored for decades to achieve controlled fusion. Says Robert Conn, director of UCLA's Institute of Plasma and Fusion Research: "Fusion events should produce radiation ((such as neutrons and gamma rays)), and radiation can be measured. If it's really fusion and there's no radiation, then it's Nirvana." Considering the amount of heat that Pons and Fleischmann reported, physicists say, the accompanying radiation should have killed them. That means either that an unusual sort of fusion took place -- a theory held by some -- or that...