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That eventually led to a showdown meeting on March 6 at which, according to a Brigham Young document, the scientists and top administrators from both universities were present. At issue was the timing of public statements. Pons and Fleischmann said they would prefer to wait before releasing results. Jones countered that he had been invited to talk about his work before the American Physical Society in May and that he intended to do so. According to Brigham Young, the meeting ended with an agreement to submit simultaneous papers to Nature on March 24. When Pons and Fleischmann suddenly announced their "breakthrough" on March 23, Jones felt he had been sandbagged.
The race with Jones appears to have forced Pons and Fleischmann to go public long before they were ready. Their paper on cold fusion is considered less -- far less -- than rigorous. "Every great discovery has had plenty of skeptics," notes Richard Muller, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, "but I can't find any great discovery of the past 50 years that was published with a bad paper. If a freshman physics or chemistry major had done it, they would have flunked." Says Robert G. Sachs, former director of ! Argonne National Laboratory: "It doesn't meet the kind of standards you'd want to meet for nuclear physics. It doesn't even meet the standards of testing in inorganic chemistry. It's a shame. They obviously just got too excited about it to think straight."
Nature asked for more information from Pons and Fleischmann before publishing the paper, but according to the journal the pair said they were too busy. Fleischmann, though, claims they supplied 19 new pages. In any case, the paper was withdrawn. Says Fleischmann: "Nature is not the appropriate place to publish because they don't publish full papers." That peculiar sentiment might come as a surprise to James Watson and Francis Crick, whose Nobel- prizewinning discovery of the structure of DNA was first published in the British journal.
None of the criticisms leveled at Pons and Fleischmann mean that they are necessarily wrong. But the burden of proof remains on them. So far, they have failed to demonstrate convincingly that they have indeed produced a new sort of fusion. And if the two chemists cannot think of any way to explain the excess heat in their experiment without resorting to nuclear reactions, others can. Chemist Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate and himself something of an iconoclast, thinks that when absorbing high concentrations of deuterium, the palladium lattice may become unstable and deteriorate, releasing heat.
Even if Pons and Fleischmann should turn out to be right, the world's energy problems are not necessarily over. As the proponents of more conventional fusion research have learned, transforming a reaction from a laboratory curiosity to a full-scale energy technology can be incredibly difficult. Magnetic fusion has yet to achieve break-even, the stage at which the amount of energy coming out is equal to that going in. Says Harold Furth, director of Princeton's effort: "We are essentially within a factor of two of break-even now. Seeing that it used to be a factor of a million, we feel extremely optimistic." But it has taken more than 30 years to get there, and plenty of technical problems remain.