Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...whole thing is over," said prominent Yale physicist Moshe Gai, who attended the conference. "Pons and Fleischmann's experiment is clearly flawed...
...Baltimore the physicists proclaimed their answer: no way. After weeks of thorough experimentation, researchers from numerous prestigious institutions, including M.I.T., Caltech, Yale and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reported that they had found no evidence of "cold" fusion. The scientists seemed incensed that they had wasted their time trying to replicate an error-filled experiment and chided the University of Utah for requesting a $25 million federal grant based on sloppy research. Said Caltech physicist Steven Koonin: "We are suffering from the incompetence and perhaps the delusions of Professors Pons and Fleischmann." When the nine members of the cold-fusion review...
Moreover, the physicists challenged the Utah team's heat measurements, saying they were probably faulty because the solution in the setup was unstirred, the temperature was not uniform and the thermometer was placed in a "hot spot." That conclusion moved Stanford physicist Walter Meyerhof to turn poetic. Said he: "Tens of millions of dollars are at stake, dear sister and brother,/ Because scientists put a thermometer at one place and not another...
...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...