Little more than a month ago, they were just two chemists, toiling in virtual anonymity. But B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann came last week to Washington as heroes, visionaries and scientific superstars. With a mob of reporters following along, the thermodynamic duo marched onto Capitol Hill to tell Congress how their simple tabletop experiment had generated fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun. Displaying slides filled with complex equations, wielding electronic pointers and pulling a mockup of their apparatus from a plastic shopping bag, the bespectacled researchers mesmerized the members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology with an account of how their device produced more energy, in the form of heat, than it consumed. The politicians may have been baffled by the chemistry, but they had no trouble grasping the implications. It seemed that Pons, a professor at the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, of Britain's University of Southampton, might have pulled off a trick that has eluded some of the best minds in physics for nearly four decades. More important, they might have found a way to solve the world's energy problems for all time.
What would it take, they were asked, to make that dream a reality? Money from Congress, of course. University of Utah President Chase Peterson, who was right there at the scientists' side, suggested that $25 million would be a nice sum to help his school set up a fusion research center. Some of the Congressmen appeared eager to oblige. "Today," rhapsodized Robert Roe, a New Jersey Democrat, "we may be poised on the threshold of a new era. It is possible that we may be witnessing the cold-fusion revolution."
But Congress had better wait a while before it starts pouring taxpayers' & money into Utah's test tubes. Even as Pons and Fleischmann stirred excitement on Capitol Hill, evidence was mounting that their form of fusion is probably an illusion. More and more scientists were openly scoffing at the chemists' claim that they had caused deuterium ions, which are commonly found in seawater, to fuse to form helium, liberating large amounts of heat. Physicists have never been able to achieve such a sustained reaction, even briefly, without subjecting deuterium to the kind of extreme temperature and pressure found inside the sun.
While no one has proved conclusively that Pons and Fleischmann are wrong, it seems likely that they jumped to a hasty conclusion based on incomplete research. Scientists in Japan and Switzerland announced that their own tests had convinced them the original work was flawed. An attempt by the Harwell Laboratory in Britain to confirm the discovery has also produced nothing, even though Fleischmann himself checked the experiments.