14 Years Later, Cold Fusion Still Gets The Cold Shoulder

segment writes "It has been 14 years since two little-known electrochemists announced what sounded like the biggest physics breakthrough since Enrico Fermi produced a nuclear chain reaction on a squash court in Chicago. Using a tabletop setup, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of the University of Utah, said they had induced deuterium nuclei to fuse inside metal electrodes, producing measurable quantities of heat. That was the opening bell for one of the craziest periods in science. Cold fusion, if real, promised to solve the world's energy problems forever. Scientists around the world dropped what they were doing to try to replicate the astounding claim." The linked AP story (carried on SFGate.com) is about the Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion, which took place in the last week of August.

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Paralell Science story

[Monkelectric]

I'm not saying that these guys did indeed produce cold fusion -- but sometimes weird shit happens

I point you to a (true) story my history teacher told us in college (if someone could sorce this that would be awesome). This scientist had produced a laser that turned out to have some special property. It's not important what the property is -- only that the laser had it, and it was unusual. The scientist published papers about his unusual lasers and the scientific community rushed to build them. Low and behold -- none of their lasers worked, but his did. Some called him a fraud, and others came to study how the lasers were made. It turned out that one of the scientists assistants had an unusual way of working with the laser tube glass -- she closed them by using the normal technique *WHILE* jumping off her stool. It turned out this was what gave the lasers their special properties.

My point is that these guys were probably wrong about cold fusion, but stranger things have happened.