As strange as it sounds, Dr. Martin Fleischmann and his jars of water were lauded in the 80s as potentially bringing forth the greatest scientific achievement in human history. Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons, working at the University of Utah, had pulled off the unthinkable: using a palladium cathode in a jar of water, the pair showed what they claimed was a working model of cold fusion, which would unlock unlimited energy potential for humans at zero environmental cost. In essence, their ‘star in a jar’ made a post-energy world seem possible. The only hang-up was that it didn’t work.Fleischmann, 85, passed away on August 3 at his home in England. A brilliant electrochemist, he’s left behind an oddly bifurcated legacy: one of hope that cold fusion could still be possible, and one of caution to researchers who think they’ve solved the equivalent of alchemy.Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment is legendary: by dropping their cathode into water and running current through the system, the pair theorized that hydrogen atoms released by the water would then be absorbed by the palladium cathode. They further predicted that the loose hydrogen atoms would fuse with those in the palladium, releasing energy. They famously reported results that showed their jar water heating up far beyond what would be expected from the electrical input or from a chemical reaction, and thus they concluded that it must have been the result of nuclear activity. That assertion blew up in the media, with every major outlet reporting on it at the time. Unfortunately for the two, their results could never be replicated by outside sources.An excellent New York Times obituary explains the backlash:One of the first hints that the news was too good to be true, skeptics said, was that both scientists were alive. Had there been as significant a nuclear reaction as they claimed, critics argued, they would have been killed by the radiation. Scientists around the world then tried, without success, to replicate the experiment. Panels for the American Physical Society and the federal Energy Department soon discredited their findings.
"I was convinced for a while it was absolute fraud," Richard D. Petrasso, a fusion scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an interview with The New York Times in 1991. "Now I've softened. They probably believed in what they were doing."
Curiously, the chase for what cold fusion represented has refused to die, as 200 corporate, university and governmental experimenters around the world are currently seeking ways to produce net energy gains in multifarious ways, Mr. Krivit said. This February, the University of Missouri received a $5.5 million gift to study the subject.Fleischmann’s biography is fascinating without the cold fusion debacle. Born in Czechoslovakia, his father was killed by Nazi occupiers. He then escaped to England to live with foster parents, and rose through the ranks of English academia and gain prominence in chemistry circles. But he’ll always been known for the fusion experiments, which, as the Times notes, is actually befitting of his reputation as a guy who “liked to come up with ideas, test them "quick and dirty" to see if they led anywhere and then let others refine them.” Reckless or not, it’s that mentality that serves as an everlasting cautionary tale to researchers everywhere: Good science can be rough and exploratory, yes, but when it comes to reporting results — especially world-changing ones — you better be darn sure that your methods are solid.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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