Path: santra!tut!draken!kth!mcvax!uunet!tank!eecae!shadooby!mailrus!ukma!tek
From: tek@ms.uky.edu (Thomas E. Kunselman)
Newsgroups: alt.fusion
Subject: Article on Claim of Fusion
Keywords: fusion response physcists
Message-ID: <11660@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 8 May 89 18:26:02 GMT
Distribution: alt
Organization: U of Ky, Math. Sciences, Lexington KY
Lines: 263


Here is another article:

PHYSICISTS SAY CLAIM OF ROOM-TEMPERATURE FUSION
BY 2 CHEMISTS IS A WIDELY PUBLICIZED MISTAKE
Re-typed without permission from Page A4,
May 10, 1989 The Chronicle of Higher Education
-Written by Kim A. McDonald

Room-temperature nuclear fusion, a widely publicized concept
promoted as a potentially limitless source of future energy,
appears to have eluded the detection of hundreds of
researchers, many of whom reported here last week that they had
been unsuccessful in duplicating the feat in their own
laboratories.

The negative reports, coupled with evidence suggesting that the
original experiments that claimed to have produced
room-temperature fusion had been plagued by serious laboratory
errors, persuaded most of the scientists attending the spring
meeting of the American Physical Society that the purported
breakthrough was actually a widely publicized mistake.

"Any reasonable scientist would have to conclude, after hearing
the talks, that it doesn't exist," said Robert L. Park, a
physicist who heads the Washington office of the physical
society.

LATE-NIGHT SESSIONS

The society had to hold two sessions that ran past midnight on
room-temperature fusion to accommodate the dozens of scientific
presentations from groups reporting negative results.  It was
the largest body of scientific evidence that had yet been
presented to refute the claim that nuclear fusion, the
energy-producing process of the sun and stars, could be
generated in a laboratory flask.

One of the most devastating reports came from researchers at
the California Institute of Technology, whose experiments
suggested that significant errors in measuring heat and
calculating power generation were responsible for the
impressive energy gains initially reported in March by B.
Stanley Pons, chairman of the chemistry department at the
University of Utah, and Martin Fleischmann, a professor of
electrochemistry at the University of Southampton in England.

"My conclusion, based on my experience and my knowledge of
nuclear fusion, is that the Utah experiments are wrong," said
Steven E. Koonin, a professor of theoretical physics at
Caltech, "and that we're suffering from the incompetence and
delusion of Pons and Fleischmann."

Nathan Lewis, an associate professor of chemistry at Caltech
who headed the experiments there, said he was convinced the
heat generated in the Utah experiment had not been produced by
any fusion process.

"At this time," he said, "we can find no evidence for anything
other than conventional chemistry."

Officials at the University of Utah, which two weeks ago asked
Congress for $25-million for a room-temperature-fusion
institute, said Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann planned to respond
to the criticism at a Los Angeles meeting of the Society of
Electrochemistry this week.

"I think the reports on the untimely death of cold fusion are
premature," said James J. Brophy, vice-president for research
at Utah.  "I think the jury is still out."

Mr. Brophy, a solid-state physicist who maintains that he is
convinced that room-temperature fusion exists, said it was
"awfully difficult for me to believe that experimental
electrochemists who have been working on their experiment for
5.5 years" could have their results dismissed by researchers
who had worked on the problem for only five weeks.

But Mr. Koonin of Caltech said the investment of time was
irrelevant, and that many of the experiments that reported
negative results at the physical-society meeting had been more
carefully designed to avoid laboratory errors and used much
more sensitive detectors than the experiments conducted by Mr.
Pons and Mr. Fleischmann.

"He's gotten it all wrong," Mr. Koonin said of Mr. Brophy's
comment.  "The level of sophistication of the current
experiments is far greater than the level of the original
experiment."

EQUIPMENT DESCRIBED AS INADEQUATE

In the Caltech experiments, Mr. Koonin said, the instruments
used to detect neutrons, a by-product of nuclear fusion, were
100,000 times more sensitive than those used in the
Pons-Fleischmann experiment.  Other groups with similar
detectors conducted the experiment hundreds of times with
similarly negative results.

Said Moshe Gai, a physicist at Yale University, who reported
that a collaborative effort with researchers at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory also yielded negative results: "It was very
clear to me that inadequate equipment was used by Pons and
Fleischmann.  It was very clear to me that the nuclear-physics
part of their program was not done in a very careful way."

Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann have repeatedly stated at
scientific meetings that they were convinced their experiment
-- a simple electrochemical cell filled with deuterium water in
which a small electrical current is run through a palladium
electrode -- had produced nuclear fusion, because it generated
three by-products, of fusion -- neutrons, gamma rays, and
tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

Skeptics have maintained that the process could not have been
nuclear fusion because the level of neutrons in their
experiment was one billion times as low as it should have been,
when compared to the amount of heat generated by their cell. 
But the two chemists have argued that their reaction, which
produced 4 to 10 times as much heat energy as it consumed, may
be a "hitherto unknown nuclear process."

Frustration over the argument and over the continued reluctance
of the two chemists to provide other scientists with all of the
details needed to reproduce their experiment, was clearly
evident in last week's presentations, some of which were spiced
with disparaging remarks and sarcastic doggerel.

REPLICAS OF THE FLASK

Some scientists said they had been forced to build replicas of
the flask used in the Pons and Fleischmann experiment based on
newspaper photographs, because the scientists had not provided
details in their publications and would not return other
researchers' telephone calls.

"Pons refuses to answer any of our inquiries," charged Mr.
Lewis of Caltech. 

Walter E. Meyerhof a professor of physics at Stanford
University who calculated that the two chemists had
overestimated the amount of energy produced by their cell
simply because their thermometer had been placed too close to
the hot center electrode, wrote this verse for the occasion:
"Tens of millions of dollars are at stake,
    dear sister and brother,
because scientists put a thermometer at
    on place instead of another."

Mr. Lewis of Caltech said the placement of the thermometer was
critical, because the flask, as designed, creates thermal
gradients where water can be hot or cold.  Because Mr. Pons and
Mr. Fleischmann failed to stir the solution, he added, they
measured a higher temperature than the overall temperature in
the flask.

"If you're in a lake in the springtime and it's colder at the
top than at the bottom, you have no idea what the temperature
on the bottom is.  You're just cold," Mr. Lewis said.  "If you
go to the bottom, you have no idea what the temperature at the
top is."

NEGATIVE RESULTS REPORTED

Mr. Lewis also noted that his team had found no statistically
significant amounts of neutrons, gamma rays, or tritium above
background levels to indicate the presence of nuclear fusion.
He also suggested that the helium detected by Mr. Pons and Mr.
Fleischmann appeared to have come from contamination of their
experiment from the helium normally found in chemistry
laboratories.

Similarly negative results were reported by researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of
California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of
Rochester, Ohio State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
in Tennessee, A.T.&T. Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J.,
and other institutions.

Douglas R. O. Morrison, a physicist at CERN, the European
Laboratory for Nuclear Physics in Geneva, said that most of the
experiments in Western Europe had also failed to confirm
room-temperature fusion.

Mr. Morrison said the reports of the phenomenon seemed to fit
the model of "pathological science," in which an erroneous
experiment initially gains support from scientists who rush to
announce confirmation, but is eventually denounced after an
accumulation of negative results.

Asked at a press conference whether he and other speakers were
95 per cent confident that the Pons-Fleischmann experiment did
not produce nuclear fusion, Mr. Morrison and 7 of the other 8
scientists present indicated that they were.  The scientist who
abstained, Johann Rafelski of the University of Arizona, said
he did so because Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann were not present
to defend themselves at the meeting and because an experiment
under the direction of Robert A. Huggins, a professor of
materials science at Stanford University, had produced excess
heat.

2 CHEMISTS WERE INVITED

Organizers of the meeting said that both scientists had been
invited, but had declined to attend because they were too busy
making preparations for a visit by members of Congress.

Sen. Jake Garn, Republican of Utah, and Rep. Wayne Owens, a
Utah Democrat, have asked members of Congress to accompany them
on a May 12 trip to the University of Utah to observe the
experiment, but they had not had any takers as of last week,
according to Congressional aides.  The two lawmakers plan to
introduce legislation in a few weeks to provide $25-million for
a room-temperature-fusion institute at Utah, the aides said.

PROMOTIONAL EFFORTS CRITICIZED

Many of the scientists at the physical-society meeting said
they were disturbed by the University of Utah's continued
promotion of room-temperature fusion, noting that they believed
the prospect of financial gains from commercial arrangements
with the university over the potential technology -- which had
also interfered with open scientific communication -- was to
blame for the widespread publicity.

"There is that pressure" for institutions to promote a
researcher's findings before they are confirmed, acknowledged
Steven E. Jones, an associate professor of physics and
astronomy at Brigham Young University, " and sometimes it can
be quite strong."

But, he added, "I am a very strong advocate for the scientific
filter, this procedure whereby scientific ideas have to pass
the scrutiny of other scientists."

Said Mr. Morrison of CERN: "It very often happens that someone
makes a mistake and gets very enthusiastic.  It is not
abnormal.  It is human nature, and one should be prepared to
accept it.

"What we have to do," he continued, "is to try to devise a
system where the scientific community can examine these
problems reasonably quickly before it gets out of hand and
people start going to Congress."

Mr. Park of the physical society said he thought one of the
most significant outcomes of last week's meeting was that, in
spite of the scanty details revealed about the experiment,
scientists were resourceful enough to obtain additional
information through informal networks and to conduct
experiments that could put the fusion claim through a rigorous
scientific review.

"Despite the efforts to thwart the system," he said, "the
system worked."



-- 
Thomas Kunselman                              {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!tek          
Office of Institutional Research       bitnet: tek@ukma.bitnet
Kentucky State University            internet: tek@ms.uky.edu
Frankfort, KY 40601                      c/o: University of Kentucky