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FUSION_SPLIT
February 11, 2012
A scientific drama I largely
watched from the side-lines, COLD_FUSION
related to the famous "cold
fusion" controversy.
I'll sketch the outline without
the actual names, though I doubt
it matters much either way.
After I'd signed on at Stanford in the
graduate program in Materials Science,
I found out that some of the professors This was a subject that weighed on my
in the department had reputations as mind back then: what incentive was
Not Good To Work For-- and as it there for a professor to treat their
happens, my advisor was one of them, graduate students well? Most of us
though not the worst. signed on to this quasi-medieval
deal without checking reputations in
The worst of them (let's just advance. And if you tried to warn a
call him Professor Worst), was new student about their choice of
the advisor of a guy that I advisor, typically they wouldn't
knew slightly, who I will call listen to you-- certainly I wouldn't.
the Wild Dude, because he had
developed a reputation as "If you get in trouble,
quite a wild man. that guy isn't going
to back you up."
WILD_DUDE
What, me get in trouble?
Back in the days before Professor Worst
and the Wild Dude split, the Dude
was one of the guy's few defenders. In retrospect: this makes me
"Oh, he's not so bad." Immediately wonder a bit about how Wild
afterwards, he changed to "Yeah, he the wild dude really was-- he
really is an asshole." knew better than to talk
trash about your own team.
When the Dude got away from him,
he not only switched advisors, he
transferred to a different school
(UCLA as I remember it-- where I'm
sure the wildman business went over
well, LA being the schtick capital
of the world.)
And right around then, Professor Worst
jumped on to the Cold Fusion fad, he and his There was a lot of this
crew slapped together a quickie experiment, buzz generation game
and announced that they could confirm the going around just then,
heat production that was seen in Utah. and many people working
the Science racket
To be fair to Prof. Worst, I looked askance at it--
attended a few talks by him and uh, guys "peer review"?
his guys, and read a few What's the deal with
interviews, and they didn't make firing off press releases?
a lot of immoderate claims.
Early on at least, their attitude
was something like "Look, we're
just investigating some peculiar Later, after a reasonably
electrochemistry, we're not well-respected fellow
claiming that this is 'cold named Bockris was
fusion' If we just get a new kind announcing he'd seen
of battery or something out of tritium production, Prof
this, that's fine." Or: "It's W. commented "That's big
always seemed to us that the news, that means this
first thing to do is establish really is some sort of
whether there's some phenomena fusion we're looking at".
here, and then worry about
whether it's 'fusion'. (Bockris's result
wasn't reproducible...
the word inside the
field was that he'd
been leaning on his
team for the correct
At one point, I was sitting results too hard...)
in the deparment lounge, doing
some studying, and Prof W.
and his crew sat down and
started holding a group meeting.
At one point, Prof. W, interrupted
and said "but he was using drawn
electrodes, not cast ones. That's
one of the two secrets, right?"
The Wild Dude's new advisor then got involved
with reproducing (or, more precisely, not
reproducing) the Utah experiment: he became
a prominent critic of cold fusion.
In effect, the Wild Dude now had an
opportunity to strike back at Prof W. One might speculate that
he'd looked for it, that
I got word from another friend of he'd urged his advisor to
mine-- he and the Wild Dude had been start checking up on Prof.
on the same Ultimate Frisbee team-- Worst.
that the Dude was looking for
some inside info on what Prof W's
group had been doing. -
I sent along my one piece of
information (the secret about drawn
electrodes), and also included a It really was
bunch of close-up photographs of a very primitive
Prof W's apparatus that had appeared setup. A styrofoam
in a local Stanford publication. cooler was used
as a tank, and the
Later, in a talk by the new only obvious
advisor from UCLA, I noted temperature
that the "secret" I'd passed measurement was
along had made the litany of a single mercury
things tried that didn't work. thermometer. There
didn't seem to be
any thermocouples
Prof W. then disappeared from wired up.
the scene... I gather it had
been decided that it was time A joke that was going
for him to retire. around in those days
was that the people
who believed it was
fusion used styrofoam
coolers, but the
people who didn't
used massive
radiation shielded
chambers.
There are a lot of features of this
story that strike me as good fodder Though I don't in fact know
for novelization... the abused grad if the Dude actuallly felt
student that defects and finds a abused, or that his "revenge"
way to strike back at his former was carefully plotted.
advisor. The "biter is bit" plot
always works. And one shouldn't feel too
sorry for Prof W: he
would've been retiring
soon in any case, and like
Though reality always all the old guard of
sprawls more than fiction: Stanford profs, I'm sure
Cold Fusion may have turned he was pretty well fixed.
out to be a hot potato for
Prof W, but he wasn't even They all had cushy
the original proponent of consulting side-gigs,
it... many of the main and owned multiple
players in the real drama pieces of California
aren't even onstage in this real estate, including
side-story-- in a Cold vacation homes in Tahoe.
Fusion novel you'd have to
make them more central.
But I always wonder whether it's
adviseable to stay close to Djerassi, when writing
actual events in a novelization. about an actual discovery,
Would this be a tale of cold did it as autobiography,
fusion, or would it be better to but when he switched to
invent something new, a novels, he engaged in
fictionalized discovery of some (very plausible)
something else? speculation.
CANTORS_DILEMMA
There are other odd details of the
story as well... one of Prof W's
crew went on to do cold fusion
research at SRI, where there was It could be that "joke"
some sort of horrible explosion about shielded chambers
that killed at least one person. had something to it... a
habit of taking short-cuts
with safety features will
This was not, of course, a eventually catch up to you.
*nuclear* explosion-- there
are many other ways for things
to explode-- though I would
guess that this distinction
would be lost in the "X Files"
version of the this tale.
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