Sunday, April 01, 2007

Cold Fusion: not quite dead?

The 1989 "discovery" of cold fusion provided one of the major scientific controversies of the 20th century, ending with an almost universal rejection of the claimed phenomenon when other scientists could not replicate the results of authors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons and suggested the excess heat they measured did not have a nuclear origin. According to a release from the American Chemical Society, a just-completed symposium hosted several papers on different approaches to "low-energy nuclear reactions." Fleischmann presented a paper offering new results. The topic remains, oddly, of more interest to chemists than to physicists, judging by the featured papers.

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