Scientists would like us to believe they are objective creatures, like Mr. Spock on the Star Trek series. The purely objective scientist, however, may be as fictitious as the pointy-eared Vulcan. The controversy over cold fusion, an emotionally charged battle between scientific orthodoxy and a band of heretics illustrates the point. What we have, Jim, as Spock might say, is not science, but opposing belief systems. This is the dilemma science finds itself in when new data contradicts old dogma. Scientists reveal a religious fervor, dropping the pretense of objectivity, showing that they, like Spock, are at least half human, capable of pride, belief, even inspiration. Einstein didn't bother pretending he was purely objective. He had beliefs about the way the universe works, gleaned from the Vedas in some cases, which he then tried to validate through the arcane calculations of theoretical physics. He said he wanted to know the thoughts of God, an admission that his own perspective could be enhanced by a new understanding. So stating, he, like Socrates, recognized the limitations imposed by intellectual pride, that knowledge requires the admission of ignorance.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

The cold fusion story began in 1989 at the University of Utah, when two electro-chemists, Professors Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, told the world they had fused atoms at room temperature, reproducing the power of the sun. Ever since, they have been the subject of criticism and ridicule from hot fusionists and theoretical physicists who say cold fusion is impossible. While Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have produced nuclear reactions in water cells, hot fusionists had been trying to do so for decades in large, expensive reactors. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having tried and failed to reproduce Pons and Fleischmann's results, cast them and cold fusion into disrepute. Physicists around the country, including a panel assembled by the U.S. Department of Energy, charged the professors with bad science, forcing them to set up a lab in France with the financial backing of Mitaru Toyota, the Japanese car manufacturer.

Pons and Fleischmann, and now numerous others, claimed to have produced nuclear reactions by placing palladium electrodes in water cells and creating excess heat', or energy. The theory is that palladium packs deuterium oxide atoms (heavy water) so tightly together inside the electrodes that they fuse and produce nuclear energy. If the significance isn't immediately apparent, be aware that fusing atoms at room temperature, if applied technologically, would change the world. Cold fusion would create clean, cheap, decentralized energy. Water cells would power homes and cars. Environmental pollution would greatly decrease. It would be the end of the fossil-fuel age and the beginning of the water-fuel age. Wars over oil, like Desert Storm, would become a thing of the past. The possibilities would be endless. Imagine irrigating Ethiopia or the Sudan with cheap, desalinized sea water, indoor fusion-heated farming complexes in Alaska. Imagine filling your Chevy with a garden hose.

While cold fusionists have suffered charges of bad science', the veracity of MIT's results have also been called into question by Dr. Eugene Mallove, author of a Pulitzer-Prize nominated book about cold fusion and former chief science-writer for the MIT News Office. Mallove resigned his post in protest, claiming top level people at MIT's physics department manipulated cold fusion data. Currently he edits Cold Fusion Technology magazine in Concord, N.H. Mallove claims the fix was in from the start, that negative conclusions were drawn before research data was analyzed, and that those involved have a vested interest in maligning cold fusion.

A Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary raised the same question about the MIT research, citing an obvious discrepancy between MIT's real and interpreted data. On the CBC program, MIT's Dr. Ronald Parker explained away admittedly shifted data curves used as evidence that there's nothing more to cold fusion than bad science. Parker said anyone who didn't understand the interpreted data, the shifted curves, doesn't understand how measurements are made.

Dr. Keith Johnson, a theoretical physicist at MIT who presumably does understand how measurements are made, responded, I don't understand what he (Parker) meant.

Even so, the bad science epitaph stuck and is even the title of an anti-cold fusion book by Gary Taubes. The D.O.E. panel drew, in effect, the same conclusion as Taubes. The panel produced a very negative report, putting the kibosh on cold fusion in the U.S. In fact, the report was so negative that officials took cold-fusion research off the table, suppressed research results at Los Alamos National Laboratory and denied patents to anything that even sounds like cold fusion., Case closed?

Hardly.

Mallove says the fix was in with the D.O.E. panel too, that the chairman, Professor John Huizenga, who labels cold fusion pathological science', and others, were biased from the start regarding cold fusion. Mallove says the co-chair, Norman Ramsey, threatened to resign if the panel completely nixed the potential of cold fusion. A small concession was made in deference to Ramsey, but the report still drew overwhelmingly negative conclusions.

While Pons and Fleischmann suffered the usual fate of voices crying in the wilderness (intellectual decapitation by DOE), cold-fusionists around the world report experimental results that conflict with the MIT tests and support the Utah results. Reproducibility of the phenomenon called excess heat', where more energy emerges from a cold fusion cell than is put in, is central to scientific credibility. And where MIT's experiments showed no reproducibility, research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of Moscow, in Japan, China, France, Italy and India have shown not only reproducibility (100% in SRI's case) but in some cases a second result crucial in proving cold fusion is real: nuclear by-products (i.e., gamma rays).

Dr. Mallove charges that scientific bigotry, as mean-spirited as religious or racial bigotry, has poisoned the waters for cold fusion in the U.S. If that sounds harsh, Mallove offers examples of high-level vindictiveness and subterfuge directed against respected individuals in the scientific community simply because they favor cold-fusion research. Mallove ascribes such bigotry to, among others, Dr. Robert Bergineau, MIT's current Dean of Science who reportedly asked, How did those flakes get on campus? referring to Professor Peter Hegelstein, an MIT graduate and cold-fusion theoretician who invited onto campus Dr. Fred Mayer, an expert in laser fusion who also published a paper on cold fusion. Furthermore, Mallove says, Hegelstein was almost denied tenure because of his support for cold- fusion.

And there's another factor working against cold fusion: $30 million dollars in research grants going into MIT's hot fusion program annually, with the director's salary at $200 thousand. Cold fusion, if perceived as viable and worthy of funding, could diminish hot fusion funding or even kill it entirely.

Mallove believes the water-fuel age will arrive within a decade. When that happens, he says, cold fusion's opponents will be struggling to regain their reputations after having launched bitter assaults against a discovery that will greatly benefit mankind. While labeling the current subterfuge surrounding cold-fusion Heavy Watergate, he predicts a more violent reaction when the first prototypical technologies appear, cars or home generators. Then, he warns, the battle will become regulatory, when fossil-fuel interests will try to pass laws to derail cold fusion technology, insisting the matter needs endless study. But Japan, Mallove says, is cold fusion's ace in the hole, a prosperous oil-dependent nation actively engaged in cold fusion research.

In the U.S. there is a degree of envy among cold fusion researchers for their Japanese colleagues. In Japan, the debate over cold fusion is polite and scientific. Researchers are not rashly judged or branded incompetent for suggesting cold fusion could be real. Their American counterparts would like to conduct research in a similar atmosphere, without accusations and emotionalism. In Japan, where over one hundred university research groups are actively trying to tap the power of the sun, the government and private sector lend legitimacy to cold fusion. The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) recently established an R&D Center and a laboratory with a four-year budget of $30 million. That's in addition to $90 million a year already allocated to research. Not surprisingly, the new R&D Center is one floor above the Toyota IMRA Institute in Hokkaido, suggesting close cooperation between the government and private industry. And Japan is only one of several countries active in cold fusion. At the Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion, in December, 1993, in Maui, Hawaii, scientists from major universities and research groups around the world convened to share recent advancements. Significantly, some attendees claimed to have produced nuclear by-products. The fifth annual conference is scheduled for the spring of 1995 in Nice, France, Pons and Fleischmann's new back yard.

Despite this worldwide support, DOE panelist, John Huizenga, MIT's Ronald Parker and other physicists contend that the idea of cold fusion is preposterous. At the heart of their contention is seventy years of theoretical physics and an intellectual and economic status-quo backed by multi-million-dollar research grants. Atoms simply do not want to fuse, they say, and will not, except in extremely high temperatures or pressures, as in the sun. Moreover, if atoms somehow did fuse in a water cell, the release of energy would kill anybody standing around. (Witness the explosion at SRI's cold fusion lab which killed one scientist and injured another.)

These objections are accepted facts and clearly make sense. But charges of bad science coming out of DOE and MIT do not make sense, given the almost universal reproduction of the baffling excess-heat phenomenon. What makes even less sense, unless we subscribe to Spock's belief-system theory, is the arrogance and verbal brutality described by Mallove when cold fusion is put to the high priests at MIT and elsewhere. Pons and Fleischmann, for instance, were reportedly executed in absentia at a gathering of the American Physical Society in Baltimore. Mallove speaks of a wake for cold fusion at MIT even before the research data was analyzed. Things get ugly when cold fusion is brought up, as if a sacred dogma has been called into question. Like medieval Inquisitors, guardians of the faith recoil, literally red faced, we are told, charging heresy. A reasonable, scientific response, one would think, would be to recognize the reproducibility of the excess heat phenomenon, hence its validity, then try to find out why it is happening.

Dr. Keith Johnson, a theoretical physicists at MIT, thinks intellectual pride plays heavily in the debate. He says theoretical physicists are notoriously confrontational egoistic people who look down their noses at electro-chemists such as Pons and Fleischmann, even though Fleischmann is considered one of the greatest electro-chemists ever. Johnson agrees that belief systems are at play, not only in the cold fusion debate but in other areas of science as well., Spock concurs.

Dr. Johnson, who says he probably understands hydrogen and palladium better than anyone, recognizes the excess heat phenomenon as being real. He says, however, that the reaction has to be chemical, not nuclear. He says recent successful experiments using light water prove that fusion is not taking place because it cannot in light, or ordinary, water. Even so, he believes water-fueled technology is viable, having filed a patent for a water-fueled motor.

The Japanese share Johnson's view that cold fusion may not be cold fusion at all, having named their MITI-financed research arm, the Institute for New Hydrogen Energy. This semantic, if not substantive, distinction may have a great deal to do with the bitter controversy over what many people call, perhaps mistakenly, cold fusion. The words have taken on a negative connotation similar to perpetual motion', especially at the U.S. Patent Office and DOE. One official in the U. S. government was reportedly enraged at the mere mention of the words, throwing out of his office an unfortunate individual who tactlessly uttered the forbidden words. Nobody wants to be associated with something that some claim is in the realm of crystals and pyramid power. Bill Clinton, no stranger to image problems, talked up cold fusion during the 1992 presidential election. But he and vice president Gore have since gone mute on the subject. Ditto Ira Magaziner, Clinton's policy aid. From the Oval Office down, officials concerned with perception more than reality have distanced themselves from this promising technology because serious scientists told them it was nutty.

One of the more interesting projects validating the excess heat phenomenon didn't start out as a cold fusion experiment at all, and may help explain why excess heat occurs when science says it should not. It was an attempt by Dr. Randall Mills of MIT to solve the long-standing mystery regarding the nature of dark matter in the universe. Astrophysicists don't know exactly what dark matter is, but they know it exists (dark matter is all the missing mass in the universe physicists can't account for). Mills, a free thinker, thought there was a problem in the calculations of quantum mechanics, which is the way subatomic reality behaves. He courageously set out to recalculate the quanta, theorizing that dark matter is actually a form of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, with a twist: an electron that rotates close to the nucleus in conjunction with a shrinking atom. The revolutionary theory, if correct, would explain why cold fusion isn't fusion at all, but the effect of a physical reality no one ever knew existed. In essence, Mills created a new belief system about the nature of the universe.

Opening a lab in Lancaster, Pa. to test his theory, Mills built a cell, much like a cold-fusion cell, using the hydrogen in water and a nickel electrode instead of palladium. Like so many others, he discovered the excess heat phenomenon, but his conclusion based on his new hydrogen theory bridged the gap between the perceived impossibility of cold fusion and the Pons and Fleischmann results. Whether by nuclear means or not, Mills produced energy from the hydrogen in water. And his theory, if correct, could account for two puzzling results present in many cold-fusion experiments: excess heat and a lack of significant radiation.

Currently, U.S. cold-fusion research continues in a quasi-underground. Some university labs, in the wake of the DOE report, continue their efforts on the sly. Ever since the report, the field has been cast into the realm of pathological science by panelist Huizenga and others, a pathology of epidemic proportions given the international efforts underway. Even so, a reliable source reports an unnamed DOE official as having said, We believe excess heat is real, but we know it's not nuclear. It seems even DOE may come around at some point, but by then it may be too late. While the U.S. sits on the sidelines, breakthroughs of historical significance take place abroad. Dr. Yan Kucherov of Moscow University has reported finding nuclear products in his experiments, perhaps the most significant development yet. Other researchers at the Maui conference claimed to have reproduced parts of Kucherov's results, including Pons and Fleischmann in France. Every year, despite all the protestations, progress continues. Researches speak of time frames from three to twenty years for the creation of viable water-fueled technology. If they are right, we are approaching the dawn of a new era in human history.

For the environmentally aware, keep in mind that cold fusion, or whatever this phenomenon is, may produce nuclear by-products. But the amount, if any, is inconsequential. Cold fusion, or new hydrogen energy, is clean, safe and infinitely abundant, potentially the best thing for the environment in the modern age. Realizing these benefits, however, may require profound change. Science, like Einstein and Socrates, will have to confess its ignorance in order to gain new knowledge. Ordinary people may have to demand en masse that no special interest stand between them and the invisible abundance of the universe. We may have to become visionaries of a sort, disentangling ourselves from the power grid, the limitations of fossil fuel, the old thinking. We may have to claim a new freedom and a better world as our birthright. That will require some daring, and a new belief system.

To boldly go...