Cold fusion and hot money

It turns out that we’ve just passed the 30^th anniversary of the announcement of the most revolutionary of scientific discoveries. On 23^rd March, 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference (you can still see it on YouTube) and told the world that they had found a relatively simple way of producing nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and very large explosions. Decades and tens of billions of dollars had been spent on finding a way of doing this on earth in a controlled way in order to generate clean energy at minimal cost (the irony!). Fleischmann and Pons (who for brevity I’ll call F & P), claimed they could do it in a test tube with some fancy electrodes, an electric current and water. The process was called “cold fusion” and the reason you’ve probably never have heard of it is, of course, that it quickly turned out that they hadn’t discovered anything of the sort.

It’s hard to overstate the potential implications of their “discovery”. Abundant, cheap, clean energy – imagine the impact that would have had on climate change and the carbon crisis. And it didn’t take long for the notion that cold fusion might have military and strategic applications to start exercising the minds of governments across the globe. In the US, where the announcement was made (F & P conducted their experiments at the university of Utah, where Pons was chairman of the Chemistry department) the Department of Energy went into overdrive.  It ordered its labs to find out if the claims were true, diverting teams of scientists from their own projects. Weekly meetings were convened and reports sent to Washington to the Secretary for Energy. Eventually the President was briefed. This was serious stuff.

The scientific community at large was desperate for details of F & P’s experiment. At the time of their press conference they hadn’t published any of their results, although they had submitted a paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The Editor understood well the potential importance of their results and fast-tracked the paper through the peer review process. However, when it was published it was relatively short, lacked detail and contained a number of errors. A paper that was submitted to Nature was withdrawn. Very quickly it began to emerge that the initial claims were wrong, the result not so much of fraud or mendacity, but sloppy science, lack of precision and over interpretation. The following year a paper was published reporting results obtained using exactly the same equipment as in the original experiment – no evidence of cold fusion was found. And there you might have though the story would have ended. Interesting to historians or science, but really just a footnote that the rest of us could forget. But then there is the money.

Money, it turns out, is involved in this story from the beginning. The University of Utah quickly had its patent lawyers on the case, and quickly devoted $5M to support cold fusion research. It also lobbied the US Government for tens of millions more dollars for the research (an effort that was unsuccessful). Industry, private equity and philanthropy got involved. By 1992 F & P were in France working with a Toyota subsidiary, an effort that eventually burned through $12M dollars and ended in 1998. Well after mainstream science had moved on, pockets of researchers in both government and private labs continued to beaver away at cold fusion (and still do). There has been no fusion success, although it’s arguable that there might have been some useful spin-offs.

The money kept flowing. Google, no less, spent another $10M on cold fusion research, between 2015 and 2019, announcing only just last week the end of its efforts  (see this commentary in Nature).  It was reported in the Financial Times that a company in North Carolina, founded by a businessman with a background in brickmaking, had attracted upwards of $100M  to develop, you’ve guessed it, cold fusion (although these days it tends to be called “low-energy nuclear reactions”).  Money came from a range of funds and groups. It’s genuinely difficult to tell the grifters from the marks, who are the dupes and who are the gamblers. Somebody appears to making a living (if not useful quantities of electricity) out of the remains of F & P’s ideas.

It turns out that real scientific revolutions are scarce. And they are often only recognised long after the revolution has occurred. Scientific revolutions that have big practical impacts on society, that lead to radical transformations in what and how we do things are even rarer, and usually come from long years of hard slog rather than eureka moments. It’s said of financial advertising that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The same is true of scientific claims, particularly those made in press conferences. But it would appear there are gullible people out there, and some of them are minted.

Scientists are human (yes it’s true!) and like most humans we are not immune to influences from outside the lab, from journalists, university administrators, patent lawyers, governments, investors et al. The priority of journalists (for whose benefit press conferences are run), particularly those who have a poor understanding of science, is to simplify and categorise information in the best way get their efforts into news bulletins or prominent pages in the publications they write for. It’s not that they are uninterested in accuracy and precision just that it’s not at the top of their priority list. So we should withstand the temptation of the quick, easy, simple story, and wait for the boring slog of control experiments, confirmation and replication. With cold fusion that’s what happened, and quite quickly. Just not quickly enough for F & P.

While not entirely victims, I do feel a tad of sympathy for F & P. They took the heat (if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors) that others, who were probably more deserving, escaped. They were the focus of that now infamous press conference. We all marched to the top of the hill with them, before tumbling down the other side. But they then got steamrollered. Many of us, placed under the pressure they found themselves under, might have made some of the poor choices they made. The warning of Proverbs 14:12 comes to mind.  

Frankly Franklin……

There is a (largely) unspoken rule that insists there are two topics of conversation that are inappropriate for polite after-dinner conversation – politics and religion. This is a rule I struggle with although it is not a big problem for me because I don’t get invited to many polite English dinner parties. The problem with this rule is that politics and religion are two of the more interesting topics worth having a conversation about. They are more interesting than those other staples – the weather and association football (or soccer as it is occasionally called). I suppose the rule developed because discussing religion and politics can be tricky. At the moment in the UK most political discussion begins and ends with Brexit, which shows no signs of being resolved any time soon. Its resolution certainly hasn’t been brought any closer by the election that should never have been. And there are lots of aspects of religion that are not worth discussing around a dinner table or anywhere else. But this weekend politics and religion have intersected in a way that has me bamboozled.

Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has called a day of prayer for tomorrow (Sunday 2^nd June) in support of that other president, Donald J. Trump (President of the United States). One hand this is perfectly understandable. As he (Franklin that is) fairly points out, praying for those in authority is something that Scripture encourages every Christian to do. So I believe that I should be praying for political leaders, both in the UK (how they need it!), and others including President Trump. What’s got me confused is what Franklin is encouraging us to pray for.

On the BGEA web page with this “call”, the invitation is to pray “that God would protect, strengthen, embolden, and direct” President Trump. Protect I get. The US president is a target regardless of who he is and what his policies are. Strengthen I get – he’s an old guy and it’s a tough job. And he certainly needs direction. But embolden? This suggests that Franklin thinks Trump is doing a fine job and going in the right direction. He needs encouragement to press on with the good work he’s started. This I don’t get. Trump’s campaign back in 2016 was marked from the outset by insults and deception. It was devoid of almost any kind of virtue, let alone Christian virtue. It was fairly clear that here was going to be a President who had, at best, a distant relationship with truth, and no understanding of (or apparent need for) humility. The “Access Holywood” tape and the abuse of John McCain should, along with other things, have made him all but unelectable. And what was hinted at in the campaign has been writ large during his presidency. None of which has anything to do with me. But here’s what I really don’t understand.

US evangelicals (an admittedly elastic term) were among Trump’s staunchest supporters and it is claimed they have largely stuck by him. US evangelical leaders (or at least a prominent proportion of them) have given him public and vocal support. For someone whose lifestyle, ambitions and pronouncements are so starkly different to what Scripture teaches they should be, this support is baffling. I know that elections are about choices and the alternative was unpalatable to many evangelicals. Among other things Hillary was also perceived to have a problem with truth.  There were Congressional hearings and FBI investigations, and accusations flying thick and fast. But just on the narrow ground of telling the truth, did Hillary really have as big a problem as Trump? In any case, if they were both so equally appalling, that’s an argument for spoiling your ballot.

I understand too that a major motivation for US evangelicals was a desire to see someone in the White House who would, in time, deliver a more conservative Supreme Court. This, so the argument goes, would provide a longer term means for preventing the slide away from supposed Biblical values. To an extent this has paid off. Trump has delivered for them, wiping out the “liberal” majority on the Court (although it remains to be seen whether this will really deliver the longer term, longed for “benefits”). My problem with this is that the US Supreme Court and the US culture wars just don’t feature in Scripture. Pride, adultery, lying all do. Being aligned with the latter to achieve the former doesn’t square with any kind of Biblically-based reasoning. Even if you thought Donald was worth taking a punt on back in 2016, how can the chaos, the dissembling, the continuing ad-hominem attacks, the coarsening of debate, the sheer incompetence, not prompt a rethink?

But Franklin does not appear to be concerned by any of this. He is not suggesting that his constituency prays for Donald’s repentance or his humbling. Neither is he asking for prayer that the political process as a whole might function better to deliver real benefits to the people. Instead, he talks about Trump’s enemies trying to destroy him. Now if by destroy we’re talking about violent or disorderly activity to overturn a lawfully elected government, going about its lawful business (although this is being argued about in multiple US courts), then this should be prayed against and resisted. Fair enough.  But presumably the enemies Franklin has in mind are Trumps political opponents. And all they seem to be doing at the moment is trying, by constitutional and lawful means, to get to the bottom of who Trump really is and what he’s been up to. Of course politics can be a dirty business. Ironically Trump was elected in part to “drain the swamp”. How has that turned out? Michael “lock her up” Flynn a convicted felon, 34 indictments or guilty pleas emerging from the now-complete Muller investigation (so much for it being a hoax), multiple administration members caught out in financial and ethics violations. Despite the desire to lock up Hillary, after investigations, reported referrals and Fox News wishful thinking, there’s been little in the way of indictments let alone convictions.

Perhaps the enemies Franklin has in mind are those who lurk in the US media who refuse to give the President a fair shake. This too is difficult to understand given the way Trump and his associates have sought to systematically malign and undermine all but the most supportive media. And the White House media operation, headed a press secretary who should know better, has consistently demonstrated the same problems with truth as their boss, as most recently highlighted in the Muller report. So what about praying for honest reporting (on all sides) and rigorous fact checking so there might be something akin informed debate based on reasonably well established and agreed facts (if such a thing is possible)?

Frankly, Franklin, you’re calling on Christians to do something most us are doing anyway (and more fervently than we have for a while given the state of politics on both sides of the Atlantic). It’s the terms of your “call” that has me confused. You seem to be taking a partisan position. I’m not arguing that Christians should not be involved in politics, although as Tim Farron’s experience recently demonstrated it’s difficult. There are lots of issues where there is plenty of scope for Christians to take different positions, many of which are political. On this side of the pond you’ll find Christians (in the Biblical as opposed to cultural sense) in different political parties arguing for mutually contradictory policies. But there’s something about Trump that is beyond politics. Given the monumental deceit, lies, attacks, misogyny, racism and dangerous incompetence at home (“healthcare – who knew it was so hard?”) and abroad (“I have a great relationship with Chairman Kim”) it’s not Donald Trump enemies that are the problem. We should pray for the man. But frankly, Franklin, you need to rethink what it is exactly we should be praying.