If your memory stretches back a little more than ten years, you will recall a golden period when all the world's energy problems seemed to be solved.

The University of Utah, in a news conference held in March 1989, announced that two of their scientists had discovered a way to produce "cold fusion." The same source of energy that allows the sun and the stars to shine for billions of years would now be available on earth. Rather than needing temperatures of millions of degrees, as in the center of stars, the process could take place at room temperature; and instead of the elaborate equipment of the large (and so far commercially unsuccessful) experimental facilities in this country and elsewhere, everything could be done in something the size of a pickle jar, on a tabletop.

The inventors were two distinguished scientists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, and the process they described had an appealing simplicity and plausibility. All you had to do was place an electrode made of the element palladium into a beaker of "heavy water." Heavy water is water in which the normal hydrogen atoms have been replaced by deuterium, a rare but naturally occurring form of hydrogen, and it is present in ordinary water at a concentration of about one part in six thousand. Palladium is a steely-white metal, also rather rare but found in many places around the world.

It has been known for generations that palladium has a natural affinity for hydrogen. A palladium rod, placed in a hydrogen atmosphere, will absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen. It will do the same thing if heavy hydrogen is used in place of ordinary hydrogen. According to Fleischmann and Pons, the palladium electrode would absorb heavy hydrogen from the heavy water, and within the palladium the heavy hydrogen nuclei would then be so close to each other that some of them would fuse.

The result would be helium, plus heat. Neutrons, present in the deuterium, would also be released as a by-product. Fleischmann and Pons reported seeing significant heat, more than could possibly be produced by chemical processes, and also a small number of neutrons. All of this happened at room temperature, in a small beaker.

So far, so good; but there were certain peculiarities in all this. Scientists have a well-defined procedure for announcing new results: pre-prints, today in the form of e-mail, are sent out describing the discovery in enough detail for others to begin the process of verification. Precedent is also very important, so a brief note is sent to the appropriate scientific journals. Scientists do not normally choose a news conference as the appropriate mechanism to reveal their discoveries.

Second, although Pons and Fleischmann were well-known scientists in their own field, that field was chemistry. But their discovery, involving as it did the combination of the nuclei of atoms, belonged very much to the field of physics. Cold fusion demanded a detailed understanding of the processes by which such nuclear combination can happen. Physicists as a group often do not have the highest regard for chemistry, which they consider as messy and unsystematic and more like cooking than science. It was, therefore, unusually satisfying to chemists and galling to physicists when Fleischmann and Pons, using the simplest of means, seemed to have made the whole expensive business of conventional nuclear fusion experiment, as performed by physicists, irrelevant.

Physicists were particularly puzzled by two things. First, the number of neutrons reported in the Pons and Fleischmann experiments was too small, by a factor of billions, to be consistent with the claimed heat production. Real fusion would produce huge numbers of neutrons, enough to be fatal to anyone in the same room as the beaker with its palladium electrode. Second, the news conference did not provide enough details of the process. That was very frustrating, since it meant that other groups lacked the information needed to confirm or deny the claimed results.

It took months before a coherent picture emerged. When the dust settled, the verdict was not in favor of Fleischmann and Pons. Some other workers observed a few, a very few, neutrons, barely more than the normal background level. Others reported some excess heat, but no neutrons, and again it was nowhere near what had been claimed by the Utah group.

What went wrong here? From the scientific point of view, you could argue that nothing went wrong. In science, a result is proposed. Others test it, and when a sufficient number of such tests have been performed, the result is either accepted or rejected. That is exactly what happened with cold fusion.

In another sense, though, particularly from the point of view of Pons and Fleischmann, things went very wrong. It is easy to ask, why didn't they seek the usual confirmation from other groups before they made their announcement? To some extent, they did. They were still in the process of doing so when the practical world of patents, prestige, and money took over from pure science.

The pressure to make an announcement quickly, and to do it through a news conference, did not come from the two chemists. It came from officials at the University of Utah. The university administrators could see a gigantic profit potential if the cold fusion claims held up. However, that potential would only be realized if patents were granted and the Utah claim to precedence was recognized. That meant moving fast, before anyone else could make some similar claim. It must have seemed like a good bet, at least to the officials: the reputation of two professional chemists, against possible multiple billions of dollars of gain for the university.

Cold fusion, once the hottest thing in science, is now dead to all but a few zealots. The main losers might seem to be Pons and Fleischmann, whose reputations were permanently damaged.

I don't agree. I feel sorry for Pons and Fleischmann, but I think that we all were big losers. Cold fusion, offering new and compact ways to power everything, would be enormously useful. In my ideal but unfortunately alternate universe, Pons and Fleischmann would have been vindicated, and you and I would now be driving cold-fusion-powered cars.

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