"Cold fusion" claims are turning out to be the scientific version of Pandora's box - once released, they have caused endless rancor and dispute.
Not only was the University of Utah's scientific reputation strained, to say the least, by the 1989 announcement that two researchers at the school had found the key to limitless, clean energy, but ugly name-calling also broke out at normally staid scientific conferences.And now, wrangling over cold fusion threatens to undermine the tranquillity of the august Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Eugene Mallove, the former chief science writer in the MIT news office, has filed a formal request for a scientific misconduct inquiry at the school. He charged that researchers tampered with a curve in their data to make it appear that cold fusion wasn't happening - when he believes it might have taken place.
Mallove, author of the pro-cold fusion book "Fire from Ice," makes no bones about his belief: "My view now is the case for cold fusion is overwhelming," he said in a telephone interview.
"Nuclear effects" from cold fusion experiments are now an established fact, he said. These include the production of tritium, charged particles and energy bursts - occurrences that would be expected if a nuclear reaction were taking place.
"But the most impressive thing to me, and the most critical thing for believing in (that) cold fusion is what's going on, is the heat," he said. Many good experiments, including those of B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, have validated excess heat generation in the cold fusion apparatus, he said.
However, he contends that MIT engaged in "absolutely scandalous" behavior to discredit the cold-fusion theory. MIT experimenters checking into cold fusion had a preconception that it was impossible, he added.
A team from the MIT Plasma Fusion Center and the chemistry department tried to reproduce the Utah findings but reported they could not detect excess heat.
Mallove charges that a comparison of heat curves from the experimenters' raw data shows that excess heat may have been generated after all.
Two sets of apparatus were used. One held heavy water - which could be expected to show more of a fusion effect - and the other had ordinary water.
"The two graphs for July 10 (1989) are absolutely different. There is no question at all," Mallove said.
In the case of the ordinary water, the heat curve "oscillates merrily about the zero line," he said. "It goes up and down."
Those small fluctuations are the ordinary "noise" of scientific research - the static of measuring errors. On average, light water shows no power output.
But for the heavy water experiment performed at the same time, he said, "the line is substantially above zero - it's almost exclusively above the zero line . . . It's noisy, and it's not far above the line."
Mallove contends "it's very distinctly above the light water" output. That output from heavy water may be interpreted as about 20 milliwatts of heat.
But, he charges, in the report the curve for heavy water is shifted down "to look like the light water case, where the curve was going up and down."
Ronald R. Parker, head of the MIT Plasma Fusion Center, stands by the team's report: "We tried to reproduce the heat data that Pons and Fleischmann had published, and we were essentially unsuccessful in reproducing it.
"On the other hand, with any measurement there is uncertainty," he said.
The uncertainty factor in the experiment was a level of 40 milliwatts of heat, he said. Because of the difficulty of measuring heat input and output, there was a figure below which the fluctuations didn't matter.
According to Parker, results that showed up below that level wouldn't mean anything, because of the uncertainty factor.
If cold fusion actually took place, and the effect was only 20 milliwatts of output - "then we felt we could not identify that because our accuracy of the measurement was not sufficient to say that it was at level."
The raw data could also be interpreted as minus 20 milliwatts of heat, he said. Parker charged Mal-love simply got hold of an early interpretation.
The team did the best it could and "came up with the result of no heat." The level Mallove thinks he has detected is within the uncertainty factor, so it could be a fluctuation of the natural "static" of doing science.
If Mallove disagrees, he added, let him "write a paper on it and let the scientific audience decide what is right.
"So he's acting in a childish and irresponsible way by making accusations and not backing them up with analyses."