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None of the major national laboratories in the U.S. have obtained positive results either. This week data from one of the most comprehensive sets of experiments to date -- a collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory and Yale University -- will be presented at the spring meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore. The Brookhaven-Yale tests found no evidence of what Pons and Fleischmann saw. Brookhaven physicist Kelvin Lynn speculates that the heat produced may possibly be the result of some more conventional, though unexpected, chemical reaction. "It's quite interesting," he says, "to wonder how nature may have conspired to make them believe they had fusion."
Most damning of all is the editorial that appears in the current issue of the prestigious British journal Nature. The Pons-Fleischmann claim, writes editor John Maddox, "is literally unsupported by the evidence, could be an artifact ((a spurious result unrelated to the phenomenon under investigation)) and, given its improbability, is most likely to be one." Maddox noted that the team announced its results before performing even the most basic control experiments to verify the findings. That was an "astonishing oversight," wrote Maddox, "a glaring lapse from accepted practice."
Those are strong words, but Pons and Fleischmann are hanging tough behind their claim. Pons, in fact, says the experiments in his Utah lab have begun to produce increasing amounts of heat. And he has picked up a determined band of supporters. Robert Huggins, a respected materials scientist at Stanford, contends that he has also obtained excess heat in a series of similar experiments. Says Huggins: "The magnitudes of our observed effects are comparable to those reported earlier by Fleischmann and Pons, and lend strong support to the validity of their results."
Whether or not they turn out to be right, Pons and Fleischmann have pushed the entire scientific world into a frenzy. After the March 23 press conference in which the two chemists went public with their discovery, researchers around the globe immediately came down with fusion fever. Its symptoms were hyperactivity, insomnia and delusions of grandeur. Gleaning what meager information they could from murky faxes of an unpublished Pons-Fleischmann paper and from TV pictures of the apparatus, chemists and physicists dropped whatever else they were doing in attempts to verify or shoot down the concept of cold fusion.
Thus began one of the strangest months in the history of science. Hardly a day passed without an announcement from somewhere -- Texas, Georgia, Hungary, Brazil, India, the Soviet Union -- that at least some parts of the Pons- Fleischmann experiment had been replicated. Scientific protocol went out the window as researchers called press conferences to trumpet the latest results before verifying them.
That turned out to be a dangerous course. The Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, claimed that its team had detected neutrons, a hallmark of fusion reactions, coming from a setup similar to the one Pons and Fleischmann had used. But then the scientists had to retract the assertion, admitting with embarrassment that they had been misled by a faulty neutron detector. And chemists at Texas A&M, who initially reported significant amounts of excess heat generated by their device, were disappointed when they got less heat in later experiments.