A Chronology of Nuclear Confusion

THE 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 had produced neutrons as well. Next Texas A&M scientists showed off an experiment on April 10 that they said had confirmed the heat readings recorded previously by Pons and Fleischmann. Fusion fever was rising now. Georgia Tech said on the same day that its jean-clad researchers had detected neutrons. Maddeningly, no one seemed to be looking for both heat and neutrons in a single experiment, to nail down whether fusion was in fact occurring. But Pons showed no doubt on April 12 as he addressed 7,000 members of the American Chemical Society, who had crowded into a basketball arena in Dallas. When he was questioned, it became clear that his paper was sketchy because his technique was sketchy: he and Fleischmann had failed to do elementary control tests before going public. But it was fusion, Pons insisted, not just an unusual chemical reaction, as others had suggested. A Soviet group chimed in that day to say it had found its own neutrons. Indian scientists said the same. And on April 13, two graduate students at the University of Washington announced that they had recorded no neutrons or heat, but did detect other fusion by-products. Pons met the public again on April 17, at a press conference, to say there were some 30 institutions that had confirmed his results but were reluctant to go public with the information, in part "for legal reasons." But Robert Huggins, a Stanford materials scientist, had no legal qualms. He reported excess heat from a cold-fusion device tucked into a red picnic cooler. Because he performed a control experiment to rule out a conventional chemical reaction, this was the strongest confirmation yet. The next day, Francesco Scaramuzzi, a bearded physicist with the Italian National Agency for Nuclear and Alternative Energy, reported what has been dubbed "Frascati fusion," for the town near Rome where his team detected the neutron signature of cold fusion. This, plus other announcements from India and South America, was beginning to give the doubters pause. Then, on April 25, the tide turned. Georgia Tech, having hastily withdrawn its fusion results the previous week for fear that its equipment was bad, made the reversal official. "I don't think fusion occurred," said embarrassed team leader James Mahaffey. There was worse news to come. The collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory and Yale, using an array of the most sophisticated equipment available, concluded its tests of cold fusion and found nothing. No other national lab had done any better. And on April 27, the British journal Nature, to which Pons and Fleischmann had submitted their paper, then withdrawn it when asked to give more information, published an editorial on fusion fever. Verdict: it had been fun, but Pons and Fleischmann had been sloppy. Cold fusion, editor John Maddox bet, would most likely be a flop.