The very term 'cold fusion' will send shudders through those who know even part of this sad story. In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. This went against the prevailing theory that nuclear fusion was impossible to achieve without very high temperatures - and very expensive equipment. The experiment appeared to produce excess heat, the final products appeared to come from fusion and yet without some of the tell-tale signs of high-energy fusion. The experiment also fell within a crack between the subjects of chemistry and physics. The science community's response was to point the finger of fraud against the two scientists. Cold fusion got a hotter reception than Fleischmann and Pons could ever have imagined.
“When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident."
— Arthur Schopenhauer
You can read the details of the whole story at the New Energy Times. There are also some more very good Cold Fusion links here. Out of sheer embarrassment, or more probably fear of ridicule, those scientists who chose to carry on with research renamed the field Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). The current meeting of the American Chemical Society has a wealth of presentations from around the world, and renewed interest has also brought with it a sense of bravery and immunity from ridicule. So much so that some researchers are not only going back to the 'cold fusion' label but provocatively calling it the 'Fleischmann-Pons effect'. Strangely, a solid body of evidence is mounting but without as yet a clear theoretical foundation.
"Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." - T.H. Huxley
So whatever happened to our two heroes? In 1992, Fleischmann and Pons fled the US together and continued their work in France at IMRA (a subsidiary of Toyota). In 1995 Fleischmann retired and returned to England but didn't completely stop working as he co-authored papers with researchers at the US Navy and Italy's national laboratories. He is now 83 years old, still lives in England and suffers from Parkinson's. The fate of Stanley Pons sems more mysterious. Their work at IMRA stopped in 1998, with apparently no firm results. Pons seems to have given up his US citizenship and become a French national, still living in the South of France.
