More than four years after the University of Utah announced it had discovered a way to generate nuclear power at room temperature - a claim that soon came under heavy attack by much of the scientific establishment - cold fusion remains controversial.
The rancor is kept alive in a new book by Gary Taubes, "Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion."Taubes wrote that when U. researchers B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann made their announcement of cold fusion March 22, 1989, they acted before they had solid data to back up their theory. This happened because of a perceived competition with Brigham Young University, he added.
According to Taubes, Pons and Fleischmann believed that BYU scientist Steven E. Jones had stepped up his own research because he had seen Pons and Fleischmann's funding proposal. The proposal was made to the U.S. Department of Energy, which forwarded it to Jones for evaluation months before the announcement.
Jones disagreed with Pons' and Fleischmann's interpretation, Taubes said. But the book added, "The evidence, oddly enough, for Pons and Fleischmann's version of the event is persuasive. Indeed, Jones' logbook seems to bear out their version rather than his own."
Jones objects to Taubes' conclusion.
He told the Deseret News that he received the proposal from the DOE about Sept. 20, 1988, and that this was his first indication scientists at the university 45 miles to the north were also working on cold fusion. As Taubes acknowledges, Jones had been researching room-temperature fusion for years.
Asked whether he had any idea before seeing the proposal that the U. researchers were looking into cold fusion, Jones told the Deseret News, "None . . . I know it's weird, but it's true."
He added that he has received what are basically apologies from some people affiliated with the U. for spreading rumors that BYU had stolen or pirated U. work.
Documents to that effect are in the U.'s fusion archives, he said.
In fact, according to Jones, one of the documents in the file, written by a now-retired U. researcher, says he examined the logbooks also and added that it is not unusual for the DOE to send a proposal for review to a researcher in the same field. He also apologized for suggesting that BYU had acted improperly and said that from all he can see, Jones and BYU had behaved in a proper manner.
When he got the DOE proposal, Jones said, he talked to his department chairman, Dan Decker, about what he should do. Decker said he should go ahead and review the proposal and continue his own research but not follow the lines suggested by Pons and Fleischmann.
Jones added that the BYU work was supported by the Department of Energy since May 1986. "We'd been working on it before we heard about their (Pons and Fleischmann's) work for at least 2 1/2 years."
In fact, a paper that he co-authored about the work, "Piezonuclear Fusion," was published in 1986 by the Journal of Physics, years before Pons' and Fleischmann's proposal was circulated.
"Piezo" is a Greek word meaning to squeeze. "We were talking about squeezing hydrogen isotopes to induce fusion - which is a similar idea which, as far as I can tell, Pons and Fleischmann came up with independently," he said.
Jones and his associates were looking for neutrons and gamma radiation released from electrochemical cells using deuterium, he said.
Pons and Fleischmann were using what he calls a similar approach, but were looking for excess heat, not nuclear effects.
"I admit, it's remarkable that a similar idea should arise in dissimilar places," Jones added.
BYU had not abandoned its work, he said. "We were awaiting the development of a very sensitive neutron detector," he added. The Provo-based university was working on the detector.
"We had results in '86 with a rather crude neutron detector but felt that we could not say much until we had a good, working, sensitive detector," he added.
That development was time-consuming, and it was delayed because of the difficulty of getting grants to do the work.
"We proceeded but very slowly," he said.
As evidence of that work, he cited reports that two students wrote about the research in the spring of 1988. One student mentioned waiting for the development of the detector, Jones added.
Jones said he had been working on a project called "muon-catalyzed fusion" for years.
In the summer of 1988, it became clear that research money from the Department of Energy for muon-catalyzed fusion research was going to stop, he said. Because of that, BYU workers decided to focus on cold fusion rather than on muon work.
"That decision was made entirely independently of Pons and Fleischmann and the Department of Energy and anyone else," he said.
Jones said his wife and his brother-in-law remember his discussing the shift that summer while on vacation in Colorado. That was seven weeks before Jones learned about the Pons and Fleischmann experiments, he said.