Originally published 10 October 2000
The grand old man of science fiction, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, recently weighed in once again with the opinion that there may be something to cold fusion.
Cold fusion? I thought that will‑o’-the wisp had been laid to rest.
Back in 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, chemists at University of Utah, set the world abuzz with their claim to have produced nuclear energy in a simple tabletop experiment.
What was so exciting? When the nuclei of light elements fuse, they release energy. But it takes a heck of a high temperature to make it happen, millions of degrees. Nuclei are positively charged. To make them fuse, they have to be moving fast enough to overcome their mutual electrical repulsion.
This happens in the blazing hot cores of stars when hydrogen nuclei — protons — fuse to form helium. Proton fusion is the source of the sun’s heat and light, and ultimately the source of energy for almost all life on Earth.
Researchers have been working for years — building colossal apparatuses at staggering expense — to harness the energy of hot fusion, so far without much practical success. Thus the excitement when Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have caused hydrogen nuclei to fuse at room temperature, in an inexpensive apparatus that anyone could build.
The prospect of inexhaustible, nearly free, nonpolluting energy was splashed across the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
But many scientists, especially physicists, were skeptical. The Utah experiments seemed to violate every known law of nuclear physics. It all seemed too easy. And besides, what did chemists know about topics that properly belonged to physicists?
Phrases like “junk science” and “pathological science” were bandied about.
After an initial flurry of excitement, the hubbub resided. The experiments turned out to be notoriously difficult to reproduce. Only believers seemed to get positive results. Eventually, the scientific community arrived at a consensus: Cold fusion was a bust.
But believers in cold fusion did not give up so easily. They accused the “Church of Science” of squelching anything that did not fit the official orthodoxy. They reminded us again and again of the fates of other unorthodox scientists — Galileo, for example, or Alfred Wegener, the father of continental drift, whose ideas were scorned by their contemporaries.
No one has been a more ardent champion of cold fusion than Eugene Mallove, a science journalist who publishes cold-fusion-boosting Infinite Energy magazine out of Concord, N.H. For some reason, I have been on the magazine’s mailing list since its inception six years ago. While I cannot claim to be an avid reader, I usually flip though the pages to see what’s going on.
What’s going on is all smoke and no fire.
Every year the cold fusion community gathers for an international conference on recent research, and every year the magazine breathlessly reports world-shaking breakthroughs. Meanwhile, the number of scientists attending the conferences dwindles. According to a recent issue of Infinite Energy, most attendees are retired professors 65 to 75 years old. It would seem the bright young physicists and chemists who stand to gain the most from cold fusion breakthroughs know a dead end when they see one.
Infinite Energy can be applauded for its interest in alternate energy sources, and science can use an occasional iconoclast, but the magazine should set its bar higher.
A glance through any issue shows what’s wrong. In addition to reports on cold fusion, there are ads and articles touting perpetual motion, UFOs, antigravity, Atlantis, water memory, and other flaky ideas. You can’t dress up in a clown suit and expect to be taken seriously.
For years, Mallove has been predicting in his editorials the imminent arrival of a commercially viable cold-fusion power source, the sort of thing we could all have in our basements to supply our homes with essentially free energy. One by one, new start-up companies have promised practical cold fusion technologies. One by one, the promises have fallen silent.
I have neither the knowledge nor the time to evaluate a lot of the stuff in the magazine, but I think I know shaky science when I see it. I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I hereby promise to write Infinite Energy a check for $10,000 when the first home cold-fusion power unit shows up for sale in Sears, or any other mass-marketing store, or when the first kilowatt of cold-fusion electricity enters the power grid.
Hey, for me it’s a no-lose proposition. If cold fusion enthusiasts are chasing a will‑o’-the-wisp, then my 10 grand is safe. If I’m wrong, I’ll save 10 grand on my energy bills.
As for Authur C. Clarke, he also predicted that humans would be traveling to Jupiter by 2001, on a spaceship run by a willful computer. That’s not going to happen either.
As of 2022, successful cold fusion reactions have not been reproduced. Infinite Energy magazine still carries the torch, however. ‑Ed.
