MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report - Infinite Energy Magazine

esident skeptics waiting for government funding? No, they don’t
really want to be bothered with this research. Even if they were
inspired to do it, they wouldn’t get the money, of course. The
skeptics who influence and control DoE’s purse strings have
made sure of that. What follows is the untenable and unscientific
position of DOE, as stated by Secretary of Energy Admiral
James Watkins in a recent speech (May 6, 1991). This attitude came
about not of course exclusively from, but in no small way through
the efforts of influential members of the MIT community:
“Remember cold fusion? Front page news for weeks on end.
Will it work or won’t it? Is it the key to our energy freedom,
or a hyped-up hoax? In the end, it was neither. Just bad science.
But how was the public to form an opinion when the
scientific community itself and the
reporters who covered the story
were unable to persuasively lay out
the scientific merits of the issue.”
“But there was damage done here
too. Two members of the scientific
community made everyone in
white lab coats look fraudulent.
Congress held hearings and railed
Sec. of Energy
Admiral Watkins
against my agency and others for
not pouring millions into cold
fusion, in the process shedding no
light on the real underlying issues of energy production and
use. And at the same time, they cut my department’s budget
for real fusion energy by $50 million.”
I am aware of some relatively quiet cold fusion work done by
staff members of MIT, that was conducted discretely off campus.
There were also a few efforts carried out at Lincoln Laboratory.
Some anomalies were seen, and interest there thankfully has
not died completely. [Ed. Note: Definite excess energy later was
observed at Lincoln Labs, but the results have been withheld
from the public.—EFM] But there has been no other significant
experimental work, as far as I am aware. This is disappointing,
but not surprising. Professor Ronald R. Parker, one of the two
professors who led the limited MIT cold fusion experimental
effort from late March to late May, was quoted in his letter to
author Robin Herman (Fusion: The
Search for Endless Energy, 1990). Her
book has a concluding chapter mocking
cold fusion in which Professor
Parker is quoted. “Unfortunately, a
lot of time and effort has been wasted
due to this blunder.” I was amazed to
discover that when this statement
was made (May 11, 1989), the experiments
to explore cold fusion at MIT
had not even been completed.
Though there has been no laboratory
work since the spring of 1989, cold
fusion has been the butt of jokes and
the focus of merriment at MIT. At the
Plasma Fusion Center in the summer
of 1989, a “Wake for Cold Fusion”
party was held. One of the MIT
reviewers for a major publication
[Nature] that has blocked numerous
attempts by researchers with positive
cold fusion results to publish them,
once was known in this area by an
Robert Birgeneau
editor of that publication as,
“Rambo.” [This was Dr. Richard Petrasso of the MIT PFC] The
head of the Physics Department [Prof. Robert Birgeneau]
remarked with humor and pride in the summer of 1989 department
newsletter, “I should like to note, however, that none of
our faculty contributed to the confusion surrounding ‘cold
fusion.’”
There have been other remarkable comments. “Garbage”
was how one MIT physics professor [Prof. Martin Deutsch]
bluntly characterized cold fusion work to a prominent science
magazine [Science News] in 1989. One of the researchers who
was on the Plasma Fusion Center/Chemistry Department team
evaluating cold fusion [Prof. Ronald Ballinger] told me five
months ago that he thought Pons and Fleischmann were
“crooks who should be put in jail.” Another team member, Dr.
Richard Petrasso, was quoted recently on the front page of the
New York Times (March 17): “I was convinced for a while it was
absolute fraud. Now I’ve softened. They [Pons and Fleischmann]
probably believed in what they were doing. But how
they represented it was a clear violation of how science should
be done.” Apparently another skeptical physicist could not
sanction that severe charge. In a letter to the New York Times
printed April 9, 1991, Yale physicist Robert Kemp Adair wrote:
“Last November, I served on a a committee that met with Dr.
Pons in a review of the National Cold Fusion Institute at the
University of Utah. Though I concluded that he and Dr. Fleischmann
had seen no cold fusion, I am confident they reported
no invented data and committed no egregious breach of scientific
ethics.” Unfortunately, the insinuation of fraud applied to
these researchers was given early impetus here.
Recently, the attacks took an uglier turn both from within and
from outside MIT. Physicists Dr. Frederick Mayer and Dr. John
Reitz of Ann Arbor, Michigan—both with distinguished scientific
careers—were invited to MIT by Professors Peter Hagelstein
and Lawrence Lidsky—to conduct a scientific seminar
about their theory of “cold fusion” that appeared in their
“Nuclear Energy Release in Metals” paper, which has been published
in Fusion Technology. The seminar was advertised in the
usual channels on campus. To my knowledge, since the affair
began it was the first technical seminar on cold fusion open to
the general public at MIT that actually cast the phenomenon in
a positive light. The presentation was informative and was conducted
with dignity. I was proud to have helped facilitate this
meeting—a worthy effort, I thought, to clear the air on the topic.
In advance, Dr. Mayer had expressed a fear that he would be
scurrilously attacked, as opposed to being challenged with reasoned
arguments—as he hoped he would be. Since Dr. Mayer is
an acquaintance of President Vest (their sons are friends too,
and Dr. Mayer was at one time a soccer coach of President Vest’s
son’s team), that would have been especially offensive.
Fortunately, Dr. Mayer was not attacked at the seminar
because those most likely to offend didn’t show up; the critics
held their fire until afterwards. Apparently Dr. Robert L. Park of
the American Physical Society’s Washington office took offense
not only at the theory presented by these scientists, but at their
press conference in the Boston Sheraton Hotel the day after the
seminar at MIT. (Only three members of the media attended.)
Park, who has mocked cold fusion from the beginning, much as
his weekly electronic mail column, “What’s New,” ridicules
those who study the possible effects of low frequency electromagnetic
fields on biological systems, was also upset that I had
provided nominal assistance (on my own time) for the Reitz-
Mayer press conference.
33 Infinite Energy • ISSUE 24, 1999 • MIT Special Report