Word: fleischmann
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...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...
That eventually led to a showdown meeting on March 6 at which, according to a Brigham Young document, the scientists and top administrators from both universities were present. At issue was the timing of public statements. Pons and Fleischmann said they would prefer to wait before releasing results. Jones countered that he had been invited to talk about his work before the American Physical Society in May and that he intended to do so. According to Brigham Young, the meeting ended with an agreement to submit simultaneous papers to Nature on March 24. When Pons and Fleischmann suddenly announced their...
...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...
Nature asked for more information from Pons and Fleischmann before publishing the paper, but according to the journal the pair said they were too busy. Fleischmann, though, claims they supplied 19 new pages. In any case, the paper was withdrawn. Says Fleischmann: "Nature is not the appropriate place to publish because they don't publish full papers." That peculiar sentiment might come as a surprise to James Watson and Francis Crick, whose Nobel- prizewinning discovery of the structure of DNA was first published in the British journal...
None of the criticisms leveled at Pons and Fleischmann mean that they are necessarily wrong. But the burden of proof remains on them. So far, they have failed to demonstrate convincingly that they have indeed produced a new sort of fusion. And if the two chemists cannot think of any way to explain the excess heat in their experiment without resorting to nuclear reactions, others can. Chemist Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate and himself something of an iconoclast, thinks that when absorbing high concentrations of deuterium, the palladium lattice may become unstable and deteriorate, releasing heat...