Still, the scientists agreed to make no announcement until they had solid data for the anticipated critics. Pons was chair of the Utah chemistry department, and Fleischmann was a world leader in the little-known field of electrochemistry. Their reputations were solid, but not such as to support an announcement that exploded a major scientific paradigm.<\/p>\n
![\"cold](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe5d15a49-67ab-43b6-9af4-5a8164c2cef1_730x856.png\" "\\"cold")
<\/p>\nCold fusion calorimeter NHE diagram. Photo credit:\u00a0S. Szpak & P. A. Mosier-Boss \/ Wikimedia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Fusion itself was not controversial. It had been recognized since the 1940s, and an international arms race in thermonuclear bombs made it clear that hydrogen could be turned into helium with a monstrous release of energy. But hydrogen nuclei put up quite a resistance if you try to get them close enough together to fuse. Fusing two hydrogen nuclei yields a net output of 24 million volts, but only after you put in 4 million volts as an initial investment, like priming a pump. (See\u00a0my prequel on WhoWhatWhy<\/a>.) The only known ways to get hydrogen to fuse were either to ram two nuclei together in a particle accelerator at about 10 percent of the speed of light or, equivalently, to heat the hydrogen to a billion degrees inside a bomb.<\/p>\n Fleischmann and Pons had their epiphany in 1985, but they waited and carefully collected lab data for almost four more years before offering an announcement to the scientific world. They had some sense of the skepticism with which their report would be received, but they were unprepared for the insults and venom that were spewed at them. This announcement would end their careers.<\/p>\n Fusion at room temperature? It does not violate any known laws of physics. For example, it could be understood within Einstein\u2019s framework, E=mc^2. But it was highly unexpected, even given what was known about the weirdness of quantum mechanics. The problem is that initial 4 million volt investment. Physicists couldn\u2019t imagine where that energy could come from.<\/p>\n ONE \u2014 Identical Particles This can happen in two opposite ways. Fermions \u2014 physicists\u2019 name for the basic subatomic particles including protons, electrons, and neutrons \u2014 are \u201cantisocial\u201d in that they will shun each other. This is the deep reason that rocks are hard, and solids and even liquids are practically incompressible. Each electron in \u201ccondensed matter\u201d (meaning solid or liquid) marks out its own territory and woe be to any other electron that tries to encroach.<\/p>\n The opposite of a fermion is a boson, and bosons are hypersocial: \u201cWhatever he\u2019s doing, I want to be doing it, too!\u201d And if there\u2019s a party, every boson in town wants to be there.<\/p>\n Lasers are possible because light is made of a type of boson called \u201cphotons.\u201d Once you get a lot of photons all marching in step in exactly the same direction, there\u2019s an irresistible pull for the next light particle to join the procession. Another example is superconductivity, in which electrons can flow through a (very cold) wire without any voltage to push them.<\/p>\n If you are interested in a little more detail about bosons and fermions and how quantum physics of identical particles is fundamentally different from an intuitive notion of what it means to be identical,\u00a0I wrote about this subject last summer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yes, electrons are fermions, but sometimes, under rare circumstances and at low temperatures, pairs of electrons can coordinate to act like a single boson. This was not anything that physicists predicted, but superconductivity was observed in laboratories, and three quantum theorists came together to explain it: John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Schrieffer shared a Nobel Prize in 1972.<\/p>\n Relevance: Heavy hydrogen is a boson. Perhaps all the hydrogen nuclei in the cube of palladium were acting in concert and doing something that none of them could do separately. Each separate nucleus was far short of the 4 million volts needed to initiate fusion, but if somehow they could pool their energy, there would be plenty.<\/p>\n TWO \u2014 Quantum Tunneling<\/strong> Relevance: This is exactly what two low-energy hydrogen nuclei do when they fuse to make a helium nucleus of even lower energy. They are \u201cfalling\u201d into a lower energy state, cheating because they don\u2019t have the 4 million volt initial investment. Quantum tunneling\u00a0must be<\/em>\u00a0the explanation for how cold fusion happens, and in this sense the problem is solved, but physicists thought they knew how to predict where quantum tunneling happens and what the odds are, and in the situation of hydrogen nuclei inside a palladium crystal, they were pretty sure that quantum tunneling was unlikely. Could they have been wrong? This brings us to the third weirdness.<\/p>\n THREE \u2014 Equations That Can\u2019t Be Solved The Schr\u00f6dinger equation.<\/em><\/p>\n Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger wrote down this famous equation in 1925. He solved it for one electron in the hydrogen atom and it worked perfectly. It was quickly accepted as\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0fundamental equation of quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not the secret. The secret is that he\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0<\/em>solve it for two electrons. For just two electrons, the equation became too complicated to solve. In modern times, we\u00a0solve equations like this with supercomputers<\/a>\u00a0that give a very good approximate solution, so we know that Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s equation works well for two electrons. For three electrons, however, the equation is too complicated, even for the biggest supercomputer we have. Solving the Schr\u00f6dinger equation becomes exponentially more difficult with each new particle you add.<\/p>\n Relevance: That means that everything you\u2019ve ever heard about quantum mechanics in many-particle systems (like atoms larger than helium or any molecules or solids or even gasses) \u2014 it\u2019s all based on approximations and heuristics and semiempirical models. Physicists don\u2019t really know for sure how quantum particles behave collectively. So we can be surprised when something like cold fusion comes along, but we can\u2019t be\u00a0very<\/em>\u00a0surprised because we never really solved the full Schr\u00f6dinger equation in the first place.<\/p>\n The smartest man I ever knew was\u00a0Julian Schwinger<\/a>, who shared a Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman before he taught me quantum mechanics at Harvard. Long after I graduated, Schwinger had moved to California where he learned about the Pons and Fleischmann announcement. Schwinger had as deep a background in quantum theory as anyone alive. From all he knew, he thought about how cold fusion might work and wrote up his theory in 1981.<\/p>\n With all his laurels, Schwinger was accustomed to deference when he submitted papers to the best physics journals but, this time, the\u00a0Physical Review<\/em>\u00a0refused to even consider his theory. Every journal in the country had a policy of refusing papers on cold fusion.<\/p>\n Schwinger was incensed and wrote an angry letter, resigning from the American Physical Society: \u201cThe replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science,\u201d he declared.\u00a0Here<\/a>\u00a0is what he wrote about the experience.<\/p>\n To understand why even the towering figure of Julian Schwinger couldn\u2019t get a cold fusion paper published, we have to go back to 1989. Immediately after the surprise announcement by Pons and Fleischmann in March, the physics community went a little crazy. A plan was hatched to use the prestige of MIT\u2019s scientists to discredit the work. Before they could do any validation experiments, before they could gather a representative response from the scientific community, a statement was prepared and a press conference made headlines.<\/p>\nHow Unexpected Is Cold Fusion?<\/h2>\n
Three Weird Things About the Quantum World<\/h2>\n
\n<\/strong>If two ball bearings come from the same manufacturing process, you expect them to weigh the same, have the same hardness, bounce the same height\u2026 but they don\u2019t talk to each other. In quantum mechanics, identical particles are responsive to each other\u2019s presence, even when they are far apart.<\/p>\n
\nThink of the way a siphon can suck water up and over an obstacle, so long as the tube has an outlet on the other side of the obstacle that\u2019s lower than the water level in the inlet. Under the right circumstances, a quantum particle can do the same thing \u2014 it can \u201cfall\u201d from a high energy state into a low energy state, even when it has to \u201cfall\u201d over the top of a barrier that\u2019s even higher. You can picture an imaginary tunnel going through a mountain to get to a lower place on the far side without having to pass over the top of the mountain.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>This is a well-kept secret of quantum mechanics. Physicists don\u2019t like to talk about it.<\/p>\n![\"Schrodinger](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Cold-fusion-calorimeter-nhe-diagram.png\" "\\"Schrodinger")
<\/p>\nAftermath of the Pons-Fleischmann Announcement<\/h2>\n
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