The spring meeting of the American Physical Society is normally a cool scientific congregation, but last week's gathering of 1,500 physicists in Baltimore was more like an unusually hot celebrity roast. This elite clan convened a special panel to comment on the instant fame of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists who had dared to venture from their field into the private domain of nuclear physicists. Less than six weeks earlier, Pons, of the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of Britain's University of Southampton, claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, at room temperature. Because...
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