Prometheus, Pandora, or Piltdown Man
Last night I binged Bobby Broccoli's three-part series on University of Utah electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. In 1989, they claimed to have discovered cold fusion--that is, a sustainable nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. It sounded too good to be true. It was.
Part one covers the initial triumph of the original announcement. Fleischmann and Pons received a huge ovation when they presented at the 1989 meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas. During the Q&A, one person asked Pons "Are you Prometheus, Pandora or Piltdown man?" It's such a great line, and sums up the stakes of the research. Everyone hoped cold fusion could solve the world's energy problems. At the same time, there were concerns the free energy could be used to develop terrible new weapons. But the whole thing could just as easily be a hoax, that would erode the public's faith in science and the media's ability to reliably cover science. (Pons answered: "No comment.")
The Fleischmann-Pons experiment involved electrolysis of a palladium cathode in deuterium. Since they measured more energy coming out of the system ("anomalous heat") than they measured going in, they decided the effect could only be explained as fusion. This conclusion fell apart as soon as actual physicists got a look at their paper. Part two does a great job explaining this, and I can't do it justice here. But to make a long story short, the paper hadn't been peer-reviewed, because the Utah team was in a rush to secure a patent on their process. The chemists underestimated the energy input, overestimated the energy output, and published errors that any physicist would have caught if given the chance.
For my money, part three is where it gets interesting, because the story turns to the people who couldn't let it go. The promise of cold fusion was too enticing to simply abandon at the first sign of trouble, even if that sign was massive errors in the data. The state of Utah had a chip on its shoulder and something to prove, so it wasn't about to let the rest of the world tell them not to pour more money into more research. And hey, even if actual fusion didn't occur, the heat from the Fleischmann-Pons effect was something worth investigating...right?
Towards the end of part three, Bobby Broccoli likened the situation to cranks submitting patents for perpetual motion machines, and I realized I had seen this sort of tinhattery before. Cold fusion (or LENR, "low energy nuclear reactions") is now the province of crackpots, grifters, and snake-oil salesmen that need to believe (or need you to believe) that Fleischmann and Pons were onto something, something that They don't want you to have. It's the same sort of pernicious magical thinking that we see everywhere now, whether it's NESARA making everyone rich, or QAnon solving all the world's problems, or AI Donald Trump giving everyone a free "medbed" that cures any illness.
It seems that sometimes Prometheus, Pandora, and Piltdown Man are all one and the same.