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...
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