A sort of "nuclear war" was waged Monday as physicists attacked the cold nuclear fusion claims of researchers at both the University of Utah and Brigham Young University - and made Utah the brunt of their jokes.
But the comments by the physicists, who like to determine fusion by counting neutrons and criticize chemists for measuring heat, aren't new - and don't seem to faze B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.In Salt Lake City, Pons and Fleischmann were elated Tuesday by the physicists' remarks.
"We are extremely pleased because they confirm our findings," Pons said. "The absence of neutrons doesn't concern us in the slightest. We couldn't be happier. We and other scientists will soon tell them why this is so."
The new round of charges and rebuttals came at the American Physical Society's spring meeting and capsulized the debate that has raged between physicists and chemists since March 23 when Pons, a U. chemistry professor, and Fleischmann, of the University of Southampton, reported creating solid-state fusion in a flask.
At the large scientific gathering, dozens of researchers are presenting papers that either mercilessly attack or at least give no support for the U.'s claims. Most are also skeptical of much smaller reactions reported by BYU researchers.
The Monday conference comes on the heels of the scathing editorial in the New York Times that stated that the University of Utah "may now claim credit for the artificial-heart horror show and the cold-fusion circus, two milestones at least in the history of entertainment if not of science."
The Physical Society had planned to hold one 3 1/2-hour session on cold fusion Tuesday night, but its members offered so many cold fusion papers - 30 - that it decided to lengthen the session and extend it into a second night on Wednesday.
Society officials said Pons and Fleischmann were invited to defend their work, but declined, saying they were too busy. BYU researchers led by Steven E. Jones were present to explain and defend their research.
Papers coming from physicists all over the United States, Canada, East Germany and Argentina generally said they have not been able to duplicate results of the experiments and speculated about errors that may account for the surprising results of the U. and BYU experiments.
The physicists at the meeting gave their loudest cheer Monday night - mixed with a few boos - to S.E. Koonin of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who attacked Pons and Fleischmann.
"Based on my knowledge," he said, "the experiment is wrong. It suffers from the incompetence and delusions of Drs. Pons and Fleischmann."
Koonin said the U. researchers' graph of a curve showing gamma rays supposedly created by fusing neutrons peaks at the wrong place and has the wrong type of curve for gamma rays - and appears to have been changed from early pre-prints distributed to scientists.
He joked that maybe Utah and its environment are to blame. "I don't know how much (radioactive) radon gas they have in the lab, but I do know they mine uranium in Utah."
He said the experiment should have created "enough gamma rays to fry the researchers. But they're still alive _ as far as we know" _ which was one of the many jabs apparently aimed at Pons and Fleischmann for not coming to the meeting and not talking more to other scientists.
Koonin even came up with a list of questions he said reporters should ask Pons and Fleichmann because "since we are announcing experimental results through press conferences now, maybe we ought to have the peer review process through the press too."
Koonin described the BYU experiment results as "dubious but not impossible," saying he felt little chance existed that the little fusion reported was anything more than just background radiation present in the room.
BYU's Paul Palmer, one of the members of the BYU team led by physicist Steven E. Jones, has been listening to such criticism for a week at two other similar conferences.
He told the Deseret News that all the kicking from other scientists "has left me with a sore behind. But none of them has yet used a neutron counter as good as ours. Until they do, I say our work is more reliable."
While most of the attacks against chemists Pons and Fleischmann came from physicists, one of the stiffest criticisms Tuesday came from a fellow chemist _ Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology.
"We have seen no evidence whatsoever for nuclear reaction or even for unusual chemical reactions," he said of many experiments run at Caltech. "One of the main things we've learned . . . is how easy it is to fool oneself into thinking there is an effect where there actually is none. Each time this has happened to us, we've uncovered an artifact in the measurements that accounts for erroneously high numbers."
For example, Lewis said his team found that different points inside the jar where fusion is supposed to take place provide different temperature readings.
So if heat were measured only at one point in the hotter areas, it would give erroneously high reports of energy release possibly mistaken for fusion.
He said the solution to that problem is properly stirring the jar - which he said Pons and Fleischmann failed to do.
Lewis also said the U. results are "thermodynamically impossible," and that Caltech's experiments showed that instead of producing more heat and energy from fusion, "the cells were great fusion refrigerators."
"We are amazed that Professor Lewis has learned how to solve all those problems in only one month when it took us 5 1/2 years. We further would like to know that if his results are to be thermodynamically feasible, why is it that he doesn't observe cold spots along with his hot spots?" Pons said.
A paper prepared by Ronald Parker, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the Utah chemists "misinterpreted" readings of radiation emission by the cold fusion experiment.
Jones from BYU spent most of his time defending his own work, but said his group has found so little energy from cold fusion so far that comparing his results to that of the U. "is like comparing a dollar to the national debt."