Wouldn’t it be Wonderful?

Wouldn’t it be Wonderful?

In April 1989, some people thought we were on the cusp of a worldwide revolution.  Energy was about to become free for anyone who wanted it.  Third world countries were going to be able to build and power infrastructure at virtually no cost.  Pollution was going to disappear.  Even nuclear power plants were about to be shuttered.

During that time, I was at Harvard working on a graduate degree in Archaeology.  The local newspapers were busy covering the announcement from Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that they had produced a nuclear reaction at room temperature.  If true, that meant that the world was about to radically change.  Imagine free energy with no resultant pollution.  Too good to be true, right?

The reason some serious people took pause is that Fleischmann was one of the world’s leading electrochemists.  He was an outstanding scientist, one to be taken seriously.  For most, though, the possibility of cold fusion was not in the realm of probability, or even possibility.

The story of how and why the experiments of Pons and Fleischmann became such big news is to be found in pure human greed.  Fleischmann wanted to publish the results from their experiments in an obscure journal.  The University of Utah, where Pons was employed as a chemistry professor, wanted to make sure all patents (and all the resultant money) found their way into the University of Utah’s coffers, where it obviously belonged.  Think of how they could upgrade their sports facilities if they got a cut every time a light bulb was clicked on or an HVAC unit was engaged.

The leaders at Utah got wind of what was happening with Pons’ research and jumped the gun by holding a press conference to announce that the world was about to change.  Energy was going to become free, the world was to be powered, and poverty was to end, due to the brilliance of the administrators at The University of Utah.  After all, they were the ones who had the foresight to hire Pons in the first place.

As I sat in my little basement apartment outside of Cambridge, I read, day after day, about cold fusion and the implications such a power source had for humanity.  Of course, most of the reports were highly dubious of Pons and Fleischmann’s claims.  That is until I started to hear whispers around campus that others had also created nuclear reactions at room temperature.

First, I heard that a group from Texas A&M had done it; they had created excess heat from a tabletop experiment.  The press release did not state the exact nature of the Pons & Fleischmann experiment, but scientists the world over were able to infer how they must have done it.  Shortly after the A&M results, a team from Georgia Tech had also replicated the results.  The Harvard campus was buzzing, especially among the nonscientists.  Everyone knew that if this were true, if nuclear reactions could be produced and sustained at room temperature, then everything about the daily lives of people throughout the world was about to radically change.

A few days later, I heard unsubstantiated claims that a group next door at MIT had also created a room temperature nuclear reaction.  Was this true?  I don’t know.  But it was an indication of the times.  People were talking about this, there was a lot of excitement in the air…until there wasn’t.

It didn’t take long for both A&M and Georgia Tech to retract their results.  Within weeks all the excitement dissipated, and hard reality took its rightful place.  Cold Fusion is, and always was, a pipe dream.

During this time, I was sitting in class when a student asked the professor what he thought about the cold fusion story.  The professor said that he was talking to lots of experts in the field, and they all reacted negatively.  They said it couldn’t be true.  He paused and then told the class that he spoke to one of his colleagues on campus, a Nobel Laureate, who told him that cold fusion was highly unlikely but if the laws of physics did allow for it: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”

Unlike belief in ghosts, wood nymphs, or angels, cold fusion requires immediate proof or people are going to jump off the bandwagon. Cold fusion is in bad shape, but it is not dead yet.  The Navy has a team working on it, and there are others scattered throughout the world who are still looking into it.  Why?  Those anomalous results that were popping up in 1989 are still being observed in experiments being conducted today.  The nature of those results remains a mystery.  Of course, if those results were consistently replicable, our world would be a much different place.  Unfortunately, the Laws of Physics don’t care about what we might want or need.  They are steadfast and unbreakable, just like belief in angels.