Undead Science:
Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold
Fusion
by Bart Simon
2002, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick
NJ USA
ISBN 0-8135-3154-3, paperback, 254 pp.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
<mosher@svsu.edu>, Saginaw Valley
State University, University Center MI 48710
USA.
Fusion energy production is promising--in
2003 the United States joined the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)
project--but has shown little tangible or
commercial results after decades of research.
This reviewer remembers a family dinner
nearly forty years ago, where our guest
was the rotund (nearly 400 lbs.) scientist
Keeve M. Siegel. SIegel announced to his
colleague, my late father, that he was leaving
the University of Michigan Engineering faculty
to start a fusion energy research company
called KMS Fusion. A decade later I read
that Siegel died in Washington D.C., while
giving testimony on the importance of fusion
research to the U.S. Congress.
Siegel does not appear in Undead Science,
for the book flies over the decades of "hot"
fusion research around the world to begin
with the 1989 announcement by the University
of Utah's Stanley B. Pons and Martin Fleischmann
of successful experiments producing nuclear
energy by "cold" fusion. The results that
the two collaborators announced promised
energy obtained more easily and at lower
temperatures than required by previous reactor
processes. This book moves beyond the individual
case into a meditation on the public reception
of science. Author Bart Simon explores how
a promising field can quickly be branded
by the scientific mainstream as pseudoscience
when irreproducible (hence erroneous) results
are announced in public, which was Pons
and Fleischmann's crime. Experiments in
other labs showed evidence of some sort
of energy production, though not of the
magnitude that the two Utah researches claimed.
Yet the premature media hooplah surrounding
their announcement had already discredited
the entire field.
Simon builds a context for Pons and Fleischmann's
fifteen minutes of fame, and cites Thomas
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
and discusses the mid-nineteenth century
Devonian controversy about the age of certain
fossils. His text is informed by his own
period of research in a fusion lab, as well
as communication with a variety of scientists
whom he quotes both by name and anonymously.
My father would have enjoyed this book for
its update of international fusion research
and publication through the 1990s, including
subsequent work by Pons and Fleischmann.
He would have shelved it beside Eugene Mallove's
more enthusiastic and optimistic Fire
from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind
the Cold Fusion Furor. http://engineering-books-online.com/0471531391.html
As this is a book about science in society,
and political positioning among practicing
scientists, there is one political aspect
of fusion research regrettably omitted from
Undead Science. Publications by the
U.S. Labor Party and its central figure
Lyndon Larouche <http://www.larouchepub.com/resume.html>
were often distributed a decade ago in downtown
Mountain View, California, the heart of
Silicon Valley (boasting first Fairchild
Semiconductor, then Silicon Graphics and
Netscape, now Google and a Nokia lab). A
quirky polticial mix of right and left,
the party had some electoral success in
local races despite the stiff prison sentence
given Larouche for financial infractions.
Its significance here is that it saw and
trumpeted fusion as the answer to America's
energy needs, publishing reports http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/fall%202003/interview.html
and magazines on the topic for several years.
Larouchites are a footnote in American poltical
history, but a deserving footnote in any
cultural history of fusion energy. Since
Bart Simon is based in Montreal, Canada
he may be unaware of this tiny party in
the U.S. with a fusion-friendly technology
policy.