The "Conspiracy" to Kill Cold Fusion
Transcript
Big thank you to Nebula for sponsoring this video. [Music] >>Narrator: On the 22nd of July 2023 a preprint of a physics paper appeared online. It will be all anyone can talk about for the next month. It concerns a material called LK-99.
A room temperature superconductor. Superconductors were first found in the early 1900s. They’re remarkable because they have almost zero electrical resistance when brought down to frigid temperatures, often close to absolute
zero. And then in 1986 something amazing happened. Physicists had stumbled onto materials with critical temperatures as high as 77 Kelvin, a temp we can reach with liquid nitrogen. It was a complete upending of the scientific status quo. In one of the fastest turnarounds in the field’s
history, the discoverers won the Nobel Prize the very next year. Since then, the path forward has been obvious. Keep raising the temperature. Find one that can operate at room temperature. Without the limitation of cryogenic coolers, maglev trains could go further, MRI machines would
be cheaper, and even our power grids might be 20% more efficient. Maybe one day we could end our dependence on oil and gas. It would fundamentally change the entire way we lived. And we’ve been
searching for that holy grail for decades. That’s why LK-99 took the world by storm. For a brief moment, people wanted to believe in something. LK-99 wasn’t particularly
exotic. A mixture of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen with a hexagonal crystal shape. It looks like a hunk of unremarkable grey metal. Two of the paper’s authors, Lee and
Kim, said they’d been working on it since 1999, hence the name. This made for a great underdog story. If real, it would almost guarantee Korea its first ever Nobel prize, a goal the country had been chasing for decades.
Because it was made of relatively cheap and easy to find materials the barrier for entry was super low. It was so accessible in fact, that everyone from huge national labs to hobbyists in their basements were cranking out experiments. Science is most often done out of the public eye, mostly because it’s difficult, but also because
it’s generally very boring. But with LK-99 this was something different. Amateurs were documenting their progress on Twitter. Reddit threads tracked updates with meticulous detail.
LK-99 was a spectator sport because it felt like history was being made in real time. Part of what really captured people’s imagination was the videos. The Korean team had shown a piece of LK-99, about the size of a coin, levitating
in a magnetic field. This was a showcase of the Meissner effect, one of the two main properties of a superconductor. Soon, several more videos of levitating scraps began to appear on twitter, each one being viewed as further evidence of confirmation.
On Bilibili, a Chinese social media app, one levitation video became the most viewed video of August 1st. The reaction from many was that there is clearly something here, it doesn’t take fancy equipment to tell you what you can see with your own eyes.
With the cryptocurrency market crashing in 2023, many speculative investors turned their attention to LK-99 as the next big thing. Korean and Chinese tech stocks surged for two weeks before returning to normal in early August. Scams, hype and
misinformation flourished. Fan fiction about the authors was being published on Twitter but shared without people realizing it was completely fake. The language barrier made it even harder to verify fact from fiction.
But many scientists, from the beginning, had been skeptical. This was not their first rodeo. They’d lived through Hendrik Schon, and Ranga Dias had a paper retracted just the year before. Everyone and their kitchen sink had claimed
a room temperature superconductor before, and it was unclear why this one would be any different. First of all, the paper hadn’t even been peer reviewed, it was just a preprint. And second of all, levitation is not exclusive to superconductivity.
Plenty of magnetic materials levitate for a variety of less interesting reasons. And thirdly, no one had provided the data that actually mattered, the resistivity. Unless it reliably went to
zero, there was plenty of room for error. The skepticism was met with pushback. Open minds are how paradigms are upended. Let’s wait and see.
But as the weeks wore on, the tide quickly began to change. At least 15 labs found they couldn’t replicate the effect. A paper published in Nature on August 16th was considered by many the definitive final
word. LK-99 isn’t a superconductor. It is an insulator. Any effect that looked like superconductivity was inconsistent at best, and due to impurities in the samples, which arise
due to contamination in the fabrication process. These effects are not superconductivity, but rather small instances of regular magnetism. There was no obvious evidence of fraud, no data that was knowingly manipulated. They just got it wrong. None of this controversy needed
to happen, and it can all be traced back to one key reason. Because the team went public before their paper was properly peer reviewed. Both Kim and Lee said that the initial paper was posted online without their permission by another author.
Lee called it incomplete, and Kim admitted it was full of flaws. As for why that author rushed to go public, the reasons are unclear, but some signs point to a fear of leaks. But it is clear that
they thought they had something truly real. Even though much of the world stopped paying attention in August of 2023, some true diehards persisted. The original Korean group told anyone still listening that future papers would fix the issues.
And throughout 2024, groups in Japan and China insist that they are on the verge of a breakthrough. At the time of writing it is a little more than a year since LK-99 had its 15 minutes in the spotlight. There is something powerful about its promise that allows it to persist in people’s minds.
They put aside their usual skepticism because the potential payoff is so big. Like betting on the lottery. You know the odds aren’t great. Astronomical even.
But if it ever paid off it would change the world. So why not keep trying. What’s a couple extra months? What’s one year? What’s two? The longer you keep at it, the lonelier it gets.
Every day you keep going your peers lose a little respect for you, and you may even pass a point where your credibility is permanently stained. By then, why not go all the way? You just have to keep hoping that it will all be worth it.
>> Without some morals, or something to believe in on this planet, be it god, or science, or whatever you truly believe in. And what do you have? What do you have? What do you have—what reason do you have to survive? What reason do you have to go on? >> “He that doeth nothing is damned,
and I don't want to be damned.” [Music] For the majority of the world, Baltimore 1989 is where cold fusion died. It was so thoroughly eviscerated, alongside the credibility of Pons and Fleischmann, that anyone with just a passing interest gave up on the dream.
It became just another entry in a long list of scientific inventions that turned out to be nonsense. Polywater, N-rays, turning lead into gold. Shorthand for the impossible. But ideas
are nearly impossible to kill entirely. If it’s tantalizing enough, there will always be champions for it. And so began the long, long, summer. If you were in the room itself, cheering
alongside 2000 others to Nathan Lewis’ talk, you might have been compelled to call cold fusion dead then and there. But those who weren’t in Baltimore that day were not as easily swayed. Dozens of other labs had reported positive results.
They were also seeing heat, neutrons, tritium, or some mix of the three. Many were still on the fence, and the overwhelmingly negative atmosphere in Baltimore felt like a witch hunt to some. A level of skepticism that was crossing the line into prejudice.
A refusal to even consider that there may be something new going on here. >> People who have been unable to reproduce the experiment are not doing it correctly. >> Lewis’ talk had been recorded, but many
scientists were not able to watch it for themselves, and only heard of it secondhand from colleagues. Some argued that Lewis had done what he so many others criticized Pons and Fleischmann of, going public before they had a peer reviewed paper. But Lewis and
his group were aware of this criticism, and so they did what Pons and Fleischmann did not. They opened themselves up to questions. Lewis was personally on the phone for hours each day, speaking to those who wanted answers. His group sent over their
data and calculations via fax machine to anyone who wanted them. And in several cases, his team called up labs with positive results and pointed out errors in their experiments that eventually led to retractions. And this is why ultimately many groups came over to Lewis’
side. Pons and Fleischmann had spent months refusing to divulge key information despite asking for millions of dollars in taxpayer money, and on the rare occasions they did respond to questions, they often contradicted past answers. In Dallas, cold fusion’s advocates
were on top of the world. In Baltimore, its critics struck a near fatal blow. But you could argue that in both cases, those were echo chambers. The true decisive battle would require a confrontation of both sides.
And that would take place in Los Angeles on May 8th. This was a special session of the Electrochemistry Society. This is the definition of home turf for Pons and Fleischmann. It’s not just chemistry,
it’s electrochemistry, their exact subfield. >> We visited the Colosseum where the Christians you know were fed to the lions. I mean the parallel has occurred to me.
>>Narrator: They’ll be surrounded by allies, in a smaller arena of just 1600. And the organizers had made a point of stacking the list of speakers with only those who reported positive results. However, as soon as news of this became public the organizers received massive backlash, and agreed to accept negative papers too.
The conference itself took place without much friction. But it was the press conference that took place after that caused a PR nightmare. Hugo Rossi, dean of science at U of U called LA, quote: “the end of innocence.” After enjoying
an amicable relationship with the press for over a month, you can tell from the very first question that the vibes have shifted. >>Reporter: Dr Fleischmann, I was one of the few reporters that paid the 200 to get in there, and I think on behalf of the press we'd like to object that the session was not open to regular press coverage.
Are you willing to acknowledge any possibility at all that your observations are wrong and you did not have fusion, or are you completely convinced you had fusion? >> I have always been ready to acknowledge the fact that our experiments may be faulty. If we turn
out to be wrong I'll be the first to admit it. >> Narrator: Fleischmann shows visible frustration here. Pons and Fleischmann had done a major pivot since Baltimore, the lack of neutrons wasn’t bad news, it was actually good news.
Why? Of the three radiation branches, they were focusing on the wrong ones. They shouldn’t actually be seeing neutrons or tritium, they should be seeing helium. Here’s the big issue though, the third branch does not occur nearly as often as the first or second. Whereas those two occur roughly 50/50, the third branch is just a fraction of a percent.
You could make the argument that something about doing it at room temperature might change these percentages, but there was no solid evidence to back this up. In fact, muon catalyzed fusion, which can and does often occur at room temperature, shows no significant change in its branching ratios. And there’s another thing, this branch should give off gamma rays at 23.8 MeV.
And since they weren’t seeing those gamma rays, they argued that those rays are being absorbed by the palladium lattice. A convenient explanation. But again, even this would have some visible evidence.
High energy electrons whizzing through water causes Cherenkov radiation which has a distinct blue glow, which should be visible to the naked eye. When asked if they had seen this, Pons said quote: “To tell you the truth, we haven’t even looked for it. We’ve turned off the lights in
the laboratory and haven’t seen anything, but it’s not that dark.” Helium tends to stay embedded within palladium, and so two labs present at the conference, MIT and Sandia, called Pons’ bluff. They said they’d be happy to analyze the palladium to see how much helium was present. Pons says they can’t do that for nebulous legal reasons.
>> That decision is not up to us. We have a prior commitment and the decision is not up to us. We will get fast results, we will get these analyses done forthwith.
>> Reporter: Can you explain the nature of the prior commitments? >> No. >> Narrator: Los Alamos is in talks with U of U to make a collaboration happen. That deal, like many more to come, would soon fall apart.
Pons’ ever growing paranoia, and Utah’s fear of handing the reigns over to the federal government, meant that negotiations would soon break down. >> Los Alamos laboratory has broken off negotiations with the University of Utah to collaborate on the Pons-Fleischmann experiments.
The lab director says Los Alamos is tired of waiting for the U and will continue collaborating with BYU and Texas A&M. >>Narrator: Later on a reporter, Tom Heppenheimer, angrily asks them why they haven’t been able to run tests looking for helium. >> Reporter: Where is it? >> Pons: We have not run that analysis yet.
>> Reporter: Why not? >> Pons: It is being run now. >> Reporter: You heard that people promised a three day turnaround, I can get— >> Pons: I did not—I found out about that an hour ago okay. I’ve not waited for labratories— >> Reporter: You just dodged
the must essential issue— >> Pons: What? >> Reporter: You just dodged the must essential issue— >>Narrator: To make matters worse for our duo, the list of speakers got a last minute addition. Nathan Lewis had called in a favour, and was going to commandeer the podium to ensure the negative side was properly represented. >> We have no evidence for helium.
We have seen no neutrons at levels 10 to the 7 times more sensitive than are reported by the University of Utah results. We have seen no evidence of gamma rays. We have seen no
tritium in excess of the tritium that would be obtained by the natural enrichment of tritium in water. In conclusion, we have no evidence in our laboratory with any of our samples for fusion. It is very difficult to believe that there are
three sets of magic samples in the world. >> One of the more memorable criticisms Lewis made was the lack of stirring in the cell, which may lead to hot and cold spots. Pons and Fleischmann tried to rebut this with a video presentation.
They showed one of their cells bubbling, and then added a red dye to it. They argued that if the dye mixed in uniformly, then by extension so would the temperature. Lewis disagreed, and argued they could not know this for sure unless they had actually measured this with multiple thermometers.
When they’re asked some critical questions about their gamma ray data, Fleischmann, through a bit of wishy-washy language, retracts the data. Their most convincing piece of evidence was now gone, and a key reason many scientists lost respect for the duo.
And for what felt like the millionth time, they were asked if they had run a control with light water. Fleischmann jumps in to say they never have. Chuck Martin, who is sitting in the audience, is stunned by
this, as he had spoken to Pons over the phone one day and heard the exact opposite. But one moment, more than any other, will be shared on the news all across the country. While Nathan Lewis is complaining about the lack of public data, Fleischmann loses his cool and they have a tense
exchange which requires a moderator to intervene. >> I'm very sorry that professor Lewis has no information on the tritium levels, that is available and is available in the correction list to the paper. >> Lewis: We know the foreground, we don't know
the background. I would like to specifically— >> The background—I beg your pardon, the background is available in the corrections to the paper. >> Lewis: That might be. I would like to
specifically hear whether or not helium— >> Well then please don't—don’t laugh it off. >> Moderator: Could we go on to the questions please? >> Narrator: Fleischmann claims here that the info Lewis wants is in the errata. Lewis backs down in the clip, and Fleischmann appears to
get a win here. But when Lewis later checks the errata published in April, the data is nowhere to be found. Fleischmann had been referring to a second errata, which wouldn’t be public until June.
While this is going on, Pons stares into the crowd with an expression that says he’d rather be anywhere else. >>Reporter: Do you wish now looking back on what you've been through in this last month or so, that you had just published this quietly instead of holding the news
conference and kicked off this whole. >> I don't think the result would have been any different when the paper came out. >> I think it would have been a very marginal—in the end a very marginal difference, but I wish we had been left to get on with our work at
our own pace without the media attention. >> Narrator: This would be their last press conference in public for almost an entire year. There had been six major meetings in just two months dedicated to cold fusion. Unprecedented for any scientific phenomena.
There will continue to be meetings hosted all over, but attendance continues to drop. The next one in Santa Fe they plan for 1500 attendees, but only 500 show up. And although they have
their fair share of interesting details, they can be summed up with the comments of Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Perhaps the most accomplished fusion expert in the world. Although he wanted to believe in cold fusion, he suggested that they needed an entirely new particle to explain what they were seeing.
The Meshugatron. A play on the Yiddish word for crazy. It’s here where we’ll fast forward. [Music] If you wanted, you could tell the story of cold
fusion week by week all the way till the end of 1989. I’ll leave that for the books. Instead, I’ll cover the highlights. In April the Secretary of Energy, James Watkins, had ordered all 12 of
the US national labs to work on cold fusion, and he had asked for weekly progress reports. In the meantime, he had also ordered the creation of a dedicated panel to investigate the issue. This panel was led by John Huizenga, an alumnus of the Manhattan project. He assembled a group
of 22 members, including Richard Garwin of IBM, Steve Koonin of Caltech, and Darleane Hoffman of Berkeley. Their job was to review the data of all labs reporting positive results, and in several cases they had members visit in person. To avoid accusations of bias, the
panel consisted of a mixture nuclear fusion physicists, electrochemists, and everything in between. Accusations of bias would be made regardless, many of them by Stanley Pons. >>News Anchor: Fusion scientist
Stanley Pons previously put his lab off limits to the committee saying they are biased against the experiments. The last minute changes in that committee cleared the way for this visit. >>Narrator: Despite telling him beforehand they
wanted to see a full calibration dataset for a working cell, when they arrived Pons said he didn’t have that, and that none of the cells were currently producing excess heat because they had just had a power failure. Notably, when the panel visited other labs, like that of Texas A&M, and Stanford, not a single visit happened to occur when a cell was actively producing heat.
But on the other hand there was an ever growing list of labs that had negative results: MIT, Caltech, Bell Labs, Brookhaven, Yale, Los Alamos, Princeton, University of Michigan, Sandia, Argonne, Max Planck Institute, University of Tokyo, Chalk River. For Fleischmann the most demoralizing
one on a personal level had to be Harwell. >> Britain's Harwell laboratory announced it is giving up its attempts to duplicate the fusion experiments. >>Narrator: He had personally sent them fusion cells a month before the announcement banking on their neutron detectors to see something he
hadn’t. But they declared in June that they were stopping all cold fusion experiments. Harwell’s reputation is such that it basically killed cold fusion entirely in the UK. And by now many of the labs that had initially come out in favour had one by one retracted
their results for one reason or another. It’s worth exploring some of those reasons. On April 10th, two groups had raced to become the first in the country to confirm cold fusion. They were Georgia Tech, led by James Mahaffey, and Texas A&M, led by Chuck Martin. Georgia Tech later announced an error just four days later.
>> Fusion researchers at Georgia Tech have apparently run into a snag. >>Narrator: They realized with horror that their neutron detector was highly sensitive to temperature. So much so that even holding it
in their hands doubled the neutron reading. This is the sort of everyday equipment issue that would have been identified long before ever going public. But because this was cold fusion, and everyone was in a race to get second, basic mistakes were made due to urgency.
It was such a miserable experience that Mahaffey described the retraction as quote: “like going to a hanging, where I was the hangee.” The oversensitivity of neutron detectors was a widespread problem at several labs. At the minuscule scales they were observing, you could see a neutron spike from
nearly anything. A radiation source one room over, a sodium lamp, or a sudden power draw in the electrical grid. Nuclear science labs, more than most places, would be filled with contaminants leftover from past experiments.
And even suppliers of palladium are found to have traces of tritium in their stocks before they ever get to a lab. Chuck Martin’s group found they were seeing excess heat in light water as well as heavy water. They even swapped
out palladium for carbon electrodes, and they still saw it. After much digging they realized that their thermometer had not been properly grounded. It was supplying extra electrical current, heating the water slightly.
Their retraction comes two weeks after their initial press conference. Chuck Martin, who was a close friend of Pons, spent weeks in a state of personal agony over the issue, but eventually decided to retract the paper. Pons viewed this as a personal betrayal.
Two grad students in Seattle made waves on April 13th when they became the first groups to claim evidence of tritium production. They were using a mass spectrometer to count gas molecules. H2 has a mass of 2.
D2 has a mass of 4, DT has a mass of 5, and TT has a mass of 6. If they saw masses of 5 and 6, it would imply tritium production. However, this is still an ambiguous test, as it relied on the assumption that DDH and D3 were not being produced, which also have masses of 5 and 6 respectively.
When they reran the experiment, they confirmed that they were seeing plenty of DDH, but no DT. They retracted their results on May 25th. Lewis’ group at Caltech worked for weeks trying to come up with every possible explanation for a false positive.
When they found one, they would go around phoning labs and warn them of these pitfalls. One way to detect tritium is to mix a special chemical cocktail. Tritium, being radioactive, will cause the cocktail
to emit small flashes of light. However, they soon discovered the lithium electrolyte in the water bath has small traces of potassium in it, which also causes the small flashes. They also found an explanation for why some labs were seeing small amounts of helium embedded in their palladium rods.
Helium is often used as a cooling agent in general lab work. Over time glassware will slowly absorb helium. Throughout the cold fusion experiments small amounts of helium were leeching into the palladium.
In fact, this was the same reason that Paneth and Peters retracted their fusion paper all the way back in the 1920s. History had just repeated itself. Robert Huggins’ group at Stanford claimed they
saw excess heat in both light and heavy water, with heavy water showing noticeably more. What his group didn’t account for is that heavy water and light water have different electrical conductivity when lithium is added. With everything else the same, the heavy water will get hotter.
But besides this there also seemed to be a pattern with when they saw excess heat. It happened most often on the weekends. This is because less electricity is used on the grid on weekends, meaning slightly higher voltages were
being supplied to the experiment. One thing that both critics and advocates of cold fusion agree on is that excess heat is inconsistent. You’d only see it very occasionally. As one member of the government panel, Al Bard, argued, what was happening is that all the results
are points on a bell curve distribution. Some will show excess heat, most will show nothing, and some will even show negative. But that’s how statistics work in an experimental setting. The average
result is what you want to focus on. Therefore it’s misleading to publish a paper with positive results while neglecting to mention you saw far more negative results. If you actually took the negative results into account, your graphs would have massive error bars, showing that the
excess heat was well within the margin of error. The government panel worked well into the Fall. By their estimation around $30 million had been spent by US labs attempting to replicate the effect, and another $10 million abroad. When they published their final report in November, they
concluded that there was not quote: “convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.” >> The prospect of federal funding for cold fusion research virtually vanished today. The advisory group's recommendations are not binding on the energy department, but it would be unusual if they were ignored.
>> Although the panel largely came to a consensus, there was one bit of internal drama. One of the two co-chairs, Norman Ramsey, had been largely absent from the panel for most its tenure. When he took the role on he made a note to say it
seemed quote: “a terrible job”. And according to John Huizenga his co-chair, Ramsey spent most of the summer abroad, and later in the year he won a Nobel Prize, and was even less available. When they were drafting the final report he blindsided by them by announcing that
he was going to resign. Having such a high profile member resign right before they published would severely undermine the credibility of the report. Ramsey was willing to stay on if they included a preamble he wrote which was much less negative about cold fusion than the rest of the report. The
panel, feeling they had been backed into a corner, accepted the lesser evil of including the wishy-washy introduction. Still, Ramsey’s ultimatum would fuel rumours of conspiracy and a coverup. Chase Peterson alleged that the panel was biased.
Quote: “the university’s loudest critics have come from large, well financed schools that have sizeable stakes in the more conventional, and more expensive, hot fusion projects.” On the other hand, more than a few hot fusion experts said the opposite. >> In terms of the hard work I've put in
for 10 years on this project, you know it's sort of like a kick in the teeth, but I certainly hope that they have something there. >> If this development says that all the work that you've done in the past is really not relevant now because we have this new energy source, safe, cheap, and environmentally benign.
I’d just be tickled pink if we had that. >> The federal government would not fund cold fusion, although they were quote: “sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative experiments within the present funding system.” The report almost concluded with a quote from Alice in Wonderland.
It was removed from the final version at the suggestion of Darleane Hoffman. She felt that it would only feed into pre-existing perceptions of believers that the panel was biased. The quote went like this: ‘Alice laughed.
“There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’” [Music] >> If cold fusion was to be brought back from the brink of death, it needed a miracle. How appropriate given its birthplace. Most of the
American public had lost interest and moved on with their lives, but according to a poll taken in September, 61% of Utah residents still believed in cold fusion. When Nature rejected Pons and Fleischmann’s paper, the lieutenant governor stated quote: “We are not going to allow some English magazine to decide how state money is handled.” The first ever annual cold fusion
conference was held, as you might have guessed, in Salt Lake City, just a little over one year since the announcement. The Governor of Utah was a guest of honor at the reception, and dessert was provided by the Utah based company Mrs. Field’s cookies.
The state of Utah had paid $5 million to establish their National Cold Fusion Institute, and they were going to make sure they got their money’s worth. In July 1989 a state appointed panel would vote on whether to release the bulk of the $5 million to the NCFI.
The decision rested on whether cold fusion had been “confirmed” or not. Notably, the council had nine members, but only two of them were scientists, and one of those two was actively writing his own cold fusion funding proposal. Although by
this point there were far too many conflicting results to determine anything concrete, all 9 members of the panel voted yes on the 21st. >> I didn’t say I would give us an A, or a B ,or a C, or a D. I said we passed and so I voted.
>> Justification? Well it seems to me that if you can spend half a billion dollars for 20 years on hot fusion and not get anywhere you can certainly spend a few million dollars, a mere 10 million or something like that, on cold fusion. So I would vote absolutely for it.
>> News Anchor: And with the vote of confidence attorney general Paul Van Dam says despite news reports to the contrary, the experiments are now legally scientifically confirmed. >>Narrator: They rented out a fancy new building in the university’s research park, which would cost them nearly $300k in just the first year.
Chase Peterson’s vision for the institute was to hire somewhere between 40 to 100 researchers. They would not just be studying cold fusion, but making working commercial prototypes. But ever since its inception it had been doomed to fail.
Namely, because Pons and Fleischmann wanted nothing to do with it. Hugo Rossi was the dean of science at U of U and one of the first people Pons told about cold fusion. They had a solid relationship,
and because he was trained as a mathematician, Rossi mostly took Pons at his word on the experiments. By the summer it was clear that they needed someone in charge of the institute, and Rossi stepped up as interim director. A big part of his job was to attract funding, which
translated to PR. Rossi became a target for much public criticism, which likely contributed to a sense of stubbornness. He thought that the critics of cold fusion were being far too negative when it was still early days.
Quote: “I am somebody who left the whole Cambridge complex to come out to Utah not because it’s God’s territory but because I rebelled against the smug sureness. And that’s what I kept seeing in all this. Maybe it was just wishful thinking.
God, I want those smug assholes to be wrong. Those people who were just so damned sure of themselves.” His first order of business was to hire researchers, and naturally, he asked Pons and Fleischmann. To his surprise, they said no. >> That Carol, was one of the concerns expressed
by the council today. It has been made very clear that Pons and Fleischmann prefer to stay in their own lab in the basement of the chemistry building. >> Why? Explanations vary, but it would be reasonable to assume that they were a bit territorial after their issues with Steven Jones and Marvin Hawkins.
This was their discovery, and splitting the credit even further wasn’t something they were super eager about. It’s also likely that Pons and Fleischmann were distrustful of the U of U administration, particularly Chase Peterson, who they were now blaming for forcing the press conference and any embarrassment that came along with it.
Many people observed that between the two of them, Fleischmann dealt with the stress far better than Pons. Fleischmann had always been very social and a confident public speaker, whereas Pons was an introverted homebody who had a very close circle of friends.
And as questions about the work began to turn into doubt, Pons was visibly cracking under the pressure. Quote: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man driven to such impatience, almost as though a stone in the shoe would have driven him wild at that point.
The way people behave when they’re under far more pressure than the good Lord meant them to be under.” Even John Bockris, one of Pons’ remaining allies, said he worried for Pons’ mental health. At first, Rossi had understood Pons and Fleischmann’s reluctance to collaborate with other groups, but as the months marched
on and the retractions kept coming out he was now frustrated with their unwillingness to play nice. In June, he sent them a letter that said something to the effect of “we’re losing the propaganda war.” After significant prodding, they agreed to some form of partnership, they set up a couple of their cells at the institute.
But later, Rossi found out that they set them up as a dummy experiment. Two cells were running, but with nothing to collect data. In other words, they were just running electricity into a jar of water for show.
Rossi would defend Pons and Fleischmann for longer than most. He didn’t assume fraud for the longest time, although he did call Pons paranoid, and mentioned that he was quote: “sandbagging the community.” And Rossi only grew further wary of Pons when he submitted a funding request for
equipment sold by a company his son worked at. By August the institute had only hired two researchers, and their names didn’t start with a P or an F. Rossi was quickly becoming jaded and desperate.
BYU flatout refused to be associated with the place for obvious reasons. Eventually he did sign on Marvin Hawkins, since he had nowhere else to go. >> Reporter: If this is not fusion, if it is
some unknown chemical reaction, did we lose? >> Who lost? Are you kidding, we've done science, we've got results that has stretched the imagination, we have got the public thinking in a very positive scientific way. Has anybody lost? Not a single person. If this goes absolutely
bust nobody's lost, especially not science. >>Narrator: Mark Anderson, who had taken over from Hawkins, decided to take a job elsewhere, and leave cold fusion behind. In the meantime, Rossi had managed to recruit at least one physics prof in a sort of watchdog role.
Mike Salamon from U of U. He knew all about the drama surrounding the gamma rays and he wanted to help clear up the confusion. >> One, has fusion been seen here at the
University of Utah? Quite possibly. Has the large energy output that Pons and Fleischmann see due to nuclear fusion? No, we really don't believe it is. >> Reporter: It's probably something else? >> Our attitude is— we're raising our hands, we don't know what it is. It's possible it
is fusion. If it is we have a lot to learn. >> He offered to set up some of his detectors in Pons’ lab. One night Salamon got a call from Mark Anderson that a cell was boiling.
Salamon rushed over to the lab, saw that it was, and rushed off to get more equipment. Except when he came back, the cell was off. Pons had told Anderson to turn it off so they wouldn’t waste
any heavy water. Salamon was dumbstruck. This was the only time in over a month he had seen any cells boil, and Pons was clearly trying to prevent him from getting any meaningful data. Then
Pons told him needed space for a new detector, and so Salamon took his gear and he left. Pons would later send him a letter telling him that there had been one cell with excess heat while Salamon’s equipment was in the lab, but it just so happened to occur right after a power outage that had reset his equipment.
It was the kind of coincidence that was downright insulting to even suggest. On August 23rd, Salamon holds a press conference where he announces his negative results. He went on to write a very negative paper and submitted
it to Nature, which was published on the one-year anniversary of the original press conference. Once the paper was in print Gary Triggs sent threatening letters accusing him of libel and demanding a retraction. Pons had tried to use Triggs to silence critics before, but this had crossed a very serious line because Salamon was a fellow professor at U of U, causing
a major PR crisis. It was soon uncovered that U of U had previously paid Gary Triggs as much as $68,000 for Pons’ legal fees. That meant, technically, U of U was paying a lawyer so that one of their professors could sue another one of their professors.
This was a massive conflict of interest, and as soon as this fact was made public, U of U cut ties with Triggs. Salamon too would abandon cold fusion. Quote: “My continued involvement, even in a sort of an adversarial
role, was being perceived as extraordinarily stupid on my part. It was beginning to blacken my reputation with the faculty.” On September 26th Rossi tells the Salt Lake City Tribune that if that if the institute has no solid data to present by February, then they’ll have to shut down.
He gave that statement in response to a direct question from a reporter, but the way it was portrayed in the paper was: Quote: “State-funded lab may soon stop cold-fusion experiments.” Now you’ve got the governor pissed, and Pons and Fleischmann think Rossi has stabbed them in the back. In private they send letters
where they rant about Rossi. Quote: “He’s bent…he lies out of his teeth.” Now you’ve got private companies freezing their investments. Rossi wants to resign but realizes the terrible optics of that move, and so he sticks with it. But the final straw for him was the double-blind
double-cross. By now Pons and Fleischmann were full in on the third decay branch as their last resort. It was statistically unlikely, but if the palladium rods showed evidence of helium, then it would be potential evidence of fusion.
And so a bunch of skeptical labs like MIT and Sandia, called their bluff, and said sure, let us analyze them. After much back and forth, Pons finally agrees as long as a neutral third party acted as a mediator. Two of
the five rods had helium artificially added as a control. One rod was completely clean and had no helium. And the remaining two rods had been run in fusion cells and had supposedly generated excess heat, and therefore helium.
Critically, the labs testing for helium don’t know which rods are which, and Pons doesn’t know which rods were sent where. It’s a double blind test. On October 6th Stan Pons went to meet with the neutral third party.
The deal was that both parties would exchange data. Pons was given the helium analysis, and then he just refused to share which rods showed excess heat. He had just willfully, knowingly, ruined the double blind nature of
the test. The results of the helium analysis were just as confusing. The rod that was supposed to have zero helium in it ended up showing helium. Whether this was an accidental contamination or an intentional mix-up was impossible to prove, but it rendered the entire experiment useless.
But more to the point, the one cell that had supposedly generated heat did not show helium above the background level. The other labs wanted to publish these results, but Gary Triggs sent them all legal threats. This meant that the helium results were only made public an entire
year later in late 1990. The helium fiasco was a step too far for Rossi. Not only that, but the faculty at U of U were saying that if he stayed involved with cold fusion, they’d likely push for him not to come back as dean.
>> The interim director of Utah's cold fusion institute is stepping down to make room for some new blood. >> News Anchor: But the man who's headed this controversial private corporation claims convenience, not conflict, prompted his resignation 6 weeks early.
>> When he was back at U of U, he joined the rest of the faculty in demanding a full review of the institute. Pons and Fleischmann would be hauled in and interrogated by state officials. [Music] There was just one problem.
They were nowhere to be found. Between the two of them, Fleischmann was the easier one to track down. He had long since gone back to England, supposedly for medical reasons.
He claimed the school had not made a good faith effort to contact him, and he declined to attend the review. Pons on the other hand was nearly impossible to track down. He was so rarely in his own lab that some people
theorized he had moved his experiments to his own home, although there was no major evidence of this. And then one day, he’s just gone. He has subs teaching his classes. His house was put up for sale.
No one knows where he is. The first official contact from him is a letter via Gary Triggs where he says he’s resigning as a tenured professor, and asks for a temporary research position instead. Later he’ll ask for a year long leave of absence, which
will be denied. The public pressure had been crushing for Pons. By this point, physicist Frank Close had published his book, Too Hot to Handle, which came as close as UK libel law would allow, to implying fraud on the part of Pons.
When Close had interviewed Fleischmann, he appeared to lay the blame of the gamma ray peaks entirely on Pons. But the hate had extended to his family. His house was bombarded with phone calls, some threatening. His wife Sheila described
how classmates of their daughter began to bully her. Quote: “Our daughter was in school. At the time, she was 11 or 12 years old, a very sensitive age. Some of the children said to her, ‘Your dad’s a fraud.
Why did he do this to us. Why do we have Utah smeared like this because of your dad.’” Cold fusion had begun as a source of Utah pride. But the state had turned on Pons for embarrassing them.
Even Fleischmann is told in February that it’s highly unlikely he’ll be reappointed as a visiting professor. The next time Pons was seen in Utah was when the institute was undergoing its review, for which he was required to make an appearance. He did so only after Utah’s Assistant Attorney General told him he didn’t have a choice. This
very well could be the final time he stepped foot in Utah. When questioned by the review panel, he said the same thing he’d said since it was first announced to the world. To Pons, cold fusion was real.
But that didn’t matter. Following some investigative reporting it was revealed that $500k in donations was made to the cold fusion institute that did not come from an external source, but was in fact university funds that Chase Peterson shuffled around.
Although not strictly illegal, it was incredibly deceptive, clearly an attempt to reel in more outside money. This was a disaster for PR, and a private company halted their donation of $160k. Chase Peterson had a no confidence motion pushed on him by the faculty.
They wanted him gone. Contrary to what he said a year earlier, Peterson says he did not necessarily believe in cold fusion. He just said that if there’s even an infinitesimal chance it was, that the
enormous benefits justified taking a chance on it. He clearly believed that enough that it cost him his job. Knowing he was a dead man walking, he announced he would resign in a year’s time.
This seemed to satisfy his faculty, and they let him live out his remaining term as a lame duck. Peterson resigned as president in June 1991. That same month the institute is shut down. The $5 million they had been gifted by the state had run out, and no new money was coming in.
It was over. Even Utah had given up on cold fusion. The same could be seen in miniature in Washington, where cold fusion had become taboo.
Only Wayne Owens, representative for Utah, wasted any breath on the topic. Here he is giving a passionate speech arguing for continued funding despite the earlier disappointments. The way he’s speaking you’d think he was addressing a
packed audience, but when the CSPAN feed cuts to a wider shot of the chamber, it feels almost like the camera crew has a sense of humour. We should take a moment to revisit our friend Steven Jones, who had spent that past several months portraying himself as more pragmatic and rational version of Pons and
Fleischmann. He had accepted an offer from Yale to collaborate. They had offered up their highly sensitive neutron detectors. Remember, Jones’ claim was that he saw no excess heat, but
he did see an extremely subtle neutron spike. >> The confidence level is about 1 chance in 2 million right now that we have made a mistake. >> Narrator: Yale was even going to shut down its particle accelerator for a week to lower the background radiation.
This was a prime chance for Jones to cement his credibility. But several months went by, the collaboration went up in flames. >> I’m not sure you're doing
the right experiment either Moshe. You have to look at the—you look at just— >> You are not sure I am doing the right experiment— >> Jones: My experiment. >> —but I am convinced that you’re not doing the right neutron counting >> Narrator: Jones refused to put his name
on any of the data, data that showed no signs of neutrons. The Yale group went ahead and published without him, a scathing rebuke of Jones’ claims. There are other controversial disputes that arise.
One of the more notable is the tritium spiking allegations at Texas A&M. A group led by John Bockris is accused of fraud by fellow professors and a journalist. An internal investigation dragged on for a year, and in the end did not conclusively prove intentional tampering.
But the tritium readings that were once credited with keeping cold fusion’s hopes alive during the summer of 1989 were almost certainly due to contamination. Bockris’ reputation is stained for the rest of his career. Pons had warned many people of the deadly potential of this experiment.
Only once did his fears come true. On January 2nd 1992, a group at the Stanford Research Institute had accidentally mixed together a highly flammable amount of hydrogen and oxygen. It wasn’t fusion, it was just a normal deadly explosion.
Three people were injured, and one researcher, Andrew Riley, was killed in the blast. The lab continued their work, but now with bullet proof glass installed. A year goes by.
Then another. Cold fusion has become a taboo. In America and the UK it is seen as a colossal waste of time, energy and money. The only ones still working on it are either doing it through self funding, or they’re doing
it in secret, tucked away in a larger lab afraid of what their bosses might say if they found out. Even if you were trying to disprove it, it’s seen as beneath you. Anyone who wanted to be taken seriously were better off pretending it didn’t exist.
For the public, who can only follow what the news tells them, cold fusion feels like a future that was ripped away from them. The lofty promises that were made on March 23rd 1989 have yet to pan out. They were promised a future that
would be full of clean energy. They were told that a gallon of sea water was enough to power a city. There wasn’t supposed to be another Exxon Valdez, no more Chernobyls. Cold fusion had instead become a joke.
A throwaway punchline in an episode of the Simpsons. That thing you heard about a few years ago. “Whatever happened to that?” you’ll wonder, before moving on with your day. But there were
also those who didn’t forget. A certain subset, they believe something more sinister happened. Who was trying to shut this down? Hot fusion physicists? The Big Banks? Big Oil? Even as early as May 1989 members of the public were suspicious that some sort of coverup must be happening. Take for instance this CSPAN phone call-in hour.
>> Caller: All right you know on an ABC station in Fort Wayne Indiana, they said there's nothing to this fusion deal. That was early this week and I was wondering who's trying to cover it up will it come to pass will we ever get it.
>> Uh, sure— >> Narrator: Among the most prominent of these conspiracy mongers was Eugene Mallove. At the time of the Utah announcement he was MIT’s chief science writer and wrote many of their press releases. He believed that researchers
at MIT altered their data in an attempt to disprove cold fusion, and resigned in protest. He founded a magazine, wrote books, and even shot a documentary arguing that cold fusion was a victim of a conspiracy, a widescale reputation trap. >> The field of cold fusion has been marginalized
by the establishment by creating certain myths about it, and pejorative terminology being used which is highly inappropriate, has no bearing at all on what's being done, called pathological science, junk science. It's just basically name calling.
The equivalent of demanding that cold fusion works like hot fusion is like saying a transistor works like a radio tube. It's idiotic, it's stupid, it makes no sense and yet that's what was demanded. >> He will spend the rest of his life arguing
that commercial cold fusion energy is just a couple years away. Always a couple years away. By 1994 there was a bit of a lingering question. >> Pons and Fleischmann themselves disappeared from the scene.
Where did they go? To the south of France that's where. >> Narrator: A company called Technova had decided to invest in Pons and Fleischmann’s research. Technova as it turned out, was a subsidiary of Toyota.
>> Reporter: Pons and Fleischmann now work in a $15 million lab created for them by the Japanese. In retrospect they recall they really had no choice but to leave the United States. >> Narrator: Yet another moment of irony.
For the first time in years the two men seemed happy to be giving interviews. But it was clear the controversy had taken its toll. >> I can remember that I was extremely bitter and upset at the time.
Thought we'd been treated extremely unjustly which I still do. Again I think the critics were not operating within the bounds of sanity and I think we were victimized in that respect. I really don't have any feelings
about it anymore it's just a non-issue now. >> Fleischmann: I think you become numb >> You become numb to it. >> Narrator: But if anything, he was even more confident. >> I mean the criticisms that came
were—90-95% of the criticism was just unwarranted. Could almost use the word stupid for most of it. >> Reporter: And how many years away might you be from developing something like that? >> Well the first the first prototypes we built now are—need to be redesigned.
I would say probably by the end of the year. >>Reporter: Within a year? You're kidding. >> No I think that's attainable. >> Narrator: This prediction by Pons did not
come to fruition. In 1995 he and Fleischmann had a permanent falling out. Japan’s government pulled their funding in 1997, and a year later the lab closed entirely. The estimated investment was £12 million. We have very few details about what went down
between the two men. According to Physics World, Fleischmann and Pons disagreed on the direction of the research and Fleischmann felt like he was being ignored. The 2012 documentary The Believers contains some of the last interviews with Fleischmann.
It ends with the question of whether he’s still friends with Stanley Pons, the man he used to host a yearly Christmas party with. His answer is no. It’s clearly a painful memory.
He ponders for a moment what he would ask Pons if he saw him again. Two things. “How are you?” And after a bit of laughter, quote: “Are you continuing with the dreadful research?” Fleischmann will never fully give up on cold fusion, he’ll continue to keep in touch with those in the field, and even attend the
occasional cold fusion conference. He passed away in 2012 due to complications from Parkinson’s. If Stanley Pons was hard to get a hold of before, he would eventually vanish off the face of the earth. He lives on a farm in France with his wife.
He has no plans to return to the US, and he gave up his citizenship. He has never given a recorded interview since. All we know is that he just wants to be left alone.
[Music] In 1911, frustrated by a flood of patent applications for perpetual motion machines, the US Patent Commissioner mandated that all submissions now required a prototype to run for a full year before it would be accepted. To date there has never been a successful patent for a perpetual motion machine.
And in 2004 the Patent Office had made it routine policy to reject any submission that mentioned cold fusion. Many will still try by using a different name, but it’s nearly impossible for them not to mention the Pons and Fleischmann experiment in some form. By the late 1990s cold fusion
had become ubiquitous shorthand in popular culture as a synonym for nonsense science. The name had become toxic. This a graph of papers mentioning cold fusion since 1989. After the massive explosion of papers in 1989 and 1990 the publication rate falls off a cliff.
Most of them never even peer reviewed. As early as 1994 even advocates had begun to downplay the label. They argued that cold fusion was a misnomer. It hadn’t been coined by Pons
and Fleischmann, and by now many felt that the effect they were seeing might not even be fusion. Some took to calling it the Pons and Fleischmann effect. Steven Jones tried to push for, quote: “anomalous effects in deuterated metals”, but his word salad never caught on. The only
name that had any major staying power was LENR, or L.E.N.R. Short for low energy nuclear reactions. It does its job well. It’s mundane, and could apply to a dozen different phenomena.
And it has none of the baggage. Although even this acronym is divisive, as some people insist that it should stand for something like lattice enabled nuclear reactions, or some other variant. And that hints to the critical issue.
LENR research is highly splintered, full of conflicting theories, methods, and even interpersonal feuds. When Pons and Fleischmann left the public eye, there was no clear leader in the field to take their place. Some insist it’s still fusion, while others argue it’s an electroweak interaction.
Some argue it can be a new source of energy, others argue it’s just a scientific curiosity. Some say it can only occur in heavy water, others say light water works just fine. Some still insist on using palladium, others have moved on to nickel.
Some believe Pons and Fleischmann were mistaken but onto to something real, while others believe they were correct from the start but the scientific establishment buried their results in a concerted smear campaign. There are as many as 60 competing theoretical models, none of which
can make reliable predictions. And even those who claim to see neutrons or tritium admit that they can’t do it with any sort of consistency. The LENR advocates feel they have been pushed out of the establishment and no one will take them seriously.
Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger left the American Physical Society in protest when they refused to publish his papers on it. And so they’ve built their own communities. Forums that serve as echo chambers, where critical members are banned if they ask the wrong questions. The crux of the issue
is that maybe there’s something there, but the reputation trap is based on legitimate issues. Some of the advocates are respectable researchers with solid backgrounds. Edmund Storms from Los Alamos, Micheal McKubre from Stanford research, and
Peter Hagelstein, a tenured professor at MIT. According to this proposal from a futurist think tank: “At the beginning of 2017, there were 114 entities actively engaged in LENR R&D across four continents.” But for every person with a decent resume, there is someone who has attached themselves to LENR’s and cold fusion just to make a quick buck.
Take Randell Mills, whose theory would require a complete reworking of how we modeled the hydrogen atom, a new type of particle he called the hydrino. Mills has also trademarked the term hydrino, which means that a third party experimentalist can’t easily test his theories without first signing an IP agreement with him. Then
there is Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi, who promised commercial cold fusion reactor called E-Cat for a decade with no results. He is a blatant snakeoil salesman, with a prior history of white collar crime convictions. Despite his claims all patents he’s been awarded do not mention cold fusion.
And Patrick Cochrane had his Nevada cold fusion startup go bankrupt after raising a million dollars and he faced charges from the SEC. Those are just some of the grifters, and then you have the quacks. Take Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson.
He firmly believes in cold fusion, just like he advocates for homeopathy, quantum mysticism and parapsychology. Next is Dirdrek Irving. A former cardiologist turned cold fusion advocate,
he speaks of a personal theory of “superwaves”. In the 2012 doc The Believers, he can be seen telling Martin Fleischmann that he can reverse his Parkinsons, as cold fusion is the mechanism that both creates energy, and powers his metabolism. Irving’s medical license was revoked in 1995. Enthusiast blogger Ruby Carat wrote a comic book promoting cold fusion, and the way she speaks of it is uncannily similar to the way religious missionaries speak about their work.
Quote: “You can drop a copy by the high school chemistry club, or leave one at the doctor’s waiting room, your political representatives office, or the airport terminal – someone is sure to be inspired.” Even Steve Jones, who portrayed himself as the rational cold fusion guy, descended into conspiracy when he began vocally giving talks on how 9-11 was an inside job.
This photo has been cropped the entire video. This is the full photo. He parted ways with BYU in 2006 over his views. Even if we
were to give the benefit of the doubt to the more credible scientists on this end of the spectrum, their association with these folks gives plenty of reason to be skeptical. The fact that cold fusion and LENR attracts this sort of person does not do it any favours. With all of this in mind, it was
a major news story when in 2019 a paper appeared in Nature titled “Revisiting the case of cold fusion.” A team of 30 researchers across several labs took four years to try and induce cold fusion. Although the bit that made the headlines was that one of the labs was funded by Google. The Pons and Fleischmann effect was not repeated. One of the authors, Chiang, stressed that to his
knowledge, no experiment has unambiguously shown excess heat, once all energy sources and sinks are fully accounted for. When I wrote to one of the other authors, Matt Trevithick, he responded with this: “The conclusion of our work was that neither LENR believers nor skeptics have done enough work of enough quality to support their positions.
LENR covers a vast parameter space. In the limited time and budget we had, we got a sense of the difficulty of producing the conditions under which cold fusion is hypothesized to exist.” Another group I spoke to, ReResearch, similarly found no evidence of excess heat or nuclear products.
As for why the repeatability of results is so poor, they argue that most thermal calibrations runs are far shorter than the lengths of the experiments themselves. It’s only when you calibrate for longer than the experiment can you be sure that your heat measurements are reliable.
Quote: “As the majority of research over the past 30 years has not demonstrated this kind of calibration stability, that eliminates most of the effort in this field.” As skeptical as I am I understand why people have clung onto this for so long. >> As it was pointed out we're in
deep trouble come the year 2030, so we're going—or 2040 I think he said, so we're going to have to do something fast and you know that's why we're going to push as hard as we absolutely can to see if this is going to work. >> The issues that felt so urgent back in 1989 are still the same issues we’re dealing with today, and are barely any closer to solving them.
The necessary political and societal solutions are so divisive that they feel impossible to implement. People want to believe in a revolutionary source of energy that can be powered by our most abundant resource, seawater. Because it would be a magic bullet that would render everything else
irrelevant. Cold fusion won’t save us. We’ve been through this cycle before, and we’ll go through it again. We can’t bet everything on just technology.
With all that being said, with the renewed attention in the past few years, LENR advocates have finally gotten their wish. In 2023 the Department of Energy’s R&D fund, ARPA-E, awarded $10 million to LENR research, spread across five labs.
That’s obviously quite a huge sum of money, but to put that in context, I’d point out that they also awarded $1 billion to traditional hot fusion research. The $10 million is also not an endorsement of LENR being a real phenomenon, just that it warrants more funding to, in their own words: “break the stalemate.” “evidence for LENR is insufficient due to the ambiguous
nature of heat, numerous confounding variables, potential sources of measurement error, and possible prosaic explanations.” I have not read the vast majority of what’s been written on LENR in the past two decades. I cannot tell you definitively that there isn’t something there. And so I’m not going to object if the US government or Google wants to divert
some of their vast pools of wealth. But what I am confident on is that the work of Pons and Fleischmann was rushed, misleading, and mired with dishonesty. In recent years there has been an effort to whitewash that history.
As to whether they were treated fairly, you’ll have to decide for yourself. The last time cold fusion made prime time news was in 2009, when 60 Minutes aired a special interviewing Martin Fleischmann. The special had
little new to show, just the same claims that people have been making since the 90s. Fleischmann himself hadn’t done active research in years. >> When you hold that in your hand and you think back on what's happened these last 20 years what do you think? >> The wasted opportunity.
>> Wasted? Because it was discredited at the time? >>Narrator: What it did show was a man at the tail end of his life, wondering how this things went so wrong. >> I’m getting you interested again? >> Yes >> Interviewer: The potential is exciting? >> The potential is exciting, yes. >> The truth is, you can’t really kill an idea. Once it’s out there you can only turn the cameras off.
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