From cold fusion to human-powered flight: The greatest tech hoaxes
Unlike most of the hoaxes in this article, cold fusion is still a potential mystery. While mostly discredited, there are still scientists who believe there is a kernel of truth in the original findings of unexplained nuclear energy at low temperatures, so some work is still being done on it. The mystery started in March 1989 with some odd results in experiments by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann indicating more heat than expected had been generated, and in their view could only be explained by some type of nuclear reaction.
In a sort of mass delusion, there were initially many reports from others, including Georgia Tech and BYU, reproducing all or part of their results. Most of these were later withdrawn after being overwhelmed by the much larger number of cases where the results were not reproducible. Caltech, for example, using much better equipment than was available for the original experiment, could find no evidence of additional energy release. By May, leading physicists had held something of an emergency session on the topic, with eight of the nine announcing the claims as being debunked, using words ranging from incompetent to damning, and even insinuating fraud had been at work.
In the meantime the University of Utah, where Pons worked, had already asked the federal government to provide $25 million to pursue the effort. It is interesting to contrast the over-inflated claims and staunch defense by Pons of what were almost certainly errors in his experimental technique with the much more open way scientists at the Large Hadron Collider presented their equally unlikely findings of faster-than-light neutrinos. Speaking for the team at CERN, Professor Antonio Ereditato said as they published their hard-to-believe results, “When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this’.” At this point the LHC results are suspected to be the fault of an errant GPS or cable connection, but CERN will be running more experiments in May.
In the meantime, the effort to confirm or debunk cold fusion continues, with scientific panels continuing to split over whether it is plausible, and if so, whether any evidence has confirmed its existence.