Carl Sagan and Cold Fusion
(Originally Published March-June,
1997 In Infinite Energy Magazine Issue #13/14)
by Eugene Mallove
Astronomer and science popularizer Dr.
Carl Sagan, who lost his battle against a virulent disease this
year, could have been a major force for truth about cold fusion
research. Unfortunately, despite my sending him scientific articles
on cold fusion since 1991, plus Infinite Energy Magazine since its
inception, Carl chose to remain undecided. (Carl knew me as an occasional
correspondent from my work on interstellar propulsion and my published
bibliographic studies of SETI --for which he was graciously supportive.
The Planetary Society, which he founded, continues to sell The
In November 1989, just as the DOE was killing off
cold fusion with its rush-to-judgment travesty of a report, Carl
delivered a firm warning to science journalists about their prospective
coverage. It was very wise advice. Unfortunately, the science
journalists largely ignored his wisdom and the world has been suffering
In 1991, in Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth
Behind the Cold Fusion Furor (John Wiley & Sons), I published
what Sagan had said to the science journalists at their annual meeting
in 1989--I had recorded his dinner speech on audio tape. Here is
a small part of the section from Fire from Ice that
deals with the topic of science journalism coverage of cold fusion.
The lead-in narrative is my own, followed by Sagan's words:
From Fire from Ice, pages
The basic problem in cold fusion coverage in 1989-90 may have
been that so much contemporary science is incremental and plodding
in its accomplishments, that people ignore the longer historical
perspective in which breakthroughs--paradign shifts--do punctuate
The most obvious shortcoming of cold fusion reporting was the general
media's loss of interest following their initial few months of intensive
coverage. Cold fusion, like the man with the dog that could climb
a tree, had had its glorious "fifteen minutes of fame." After Nature
magazine and the DOE panel had rendered their negative verdicts
in the summer of 1989, precious little was heard of cold fusion.
Many science journalists simply bought into the Nature-DOE
panel line and gave up. And why not? So thick had been the disparagement
of Fleischmann and Pons and all their followers, that the mud stuck.
It became "socially unacceptable" in the science journalism community
to give too much weight to any of the cold fusion rumblings that
continued to be heard. Few made an effort to ask what those noises
might mean. Just as many good scientists had "burned out" in chasing
the elusive cold fusion Genie, so had many science journalists.
They were sick of the ups and downs, the lack of a clear decision
after so many months, and with good reason feared ridicule if they
pursued the continuing strange scientific reports.
The power vacuum was filled with the opposition viewpoint
of the hot fusioneers. By late 1990 the journalistic "consensus
view" had solidified to: "There is probably nothing to cold fusion,
but even if cold fusion is real, it probably won't be very useful."
An example was the cautiously worded assessment that respected science
writer William J. Broad of The New York Times included in
his October 9, 1990, update on hot fusion: "The allure of 'cold'
fusion was that it seemed to promise enormous energy from simple
devices that worked at room temperature, in contrast to hot fusion
machines, which must operate at temperatures above those on the
Sun, and are vastly complicated and expensive. But after a year
of intense investigation, most experts have dismissed the notion
that cold fusion, if it exists, will ever be a significant energy
Astronomer and noted Carl Sagan gave his perspective on cold
fusion and its coverage in the press when he responded to a question
posed at a gathering of science writers at Cornell University
in November 1989.
"In the case of cold fusion,"
he said, "we have a contention that you do something with palladium
and with some hydrogen isotopes on a table top, at room
temperature and you can make fusion happen, or at least
generate fusion products, or at least make some heat that otherwise
can't be generated. That's the contention. And it may or may not
have ultimate commercial applications, which is why everybody
is interested in it, not because there might be some novel physical
"Now how do we decide that?" he
continued. "Do we decide it by polling the membership of the American
Physical Society? No! Polls don't work. They might not be knowledgeable
or the minority might be right; it's happened many times in science.
Do we write an article saying, 'Well, there is a disagreement,
but the prevalent opinion is thus and so?' No. What we do is we
say, 'The scientists don't know! They can't figure it out.' Some
people say this thing, some people say that thing too early
to say say! Let's wait a few years. I guarantee that five years
from now, this will be a dead issue. It will either be, there
is such a thing or there isn't such a thing. We will not be sitting
in some middle ground wondering. The stakes are too high. Either
way, the definitive disproof of Fleischmann and Pons or
the definitive proof. The rewards are so great that scientists
competitive, querulous lot will decide one way or another."
(End of Fire from Ice quote
As we all know, the science journalists went right out and did
"poll" the physicists to reach their negative conclusions about
cold fusion exactly
what Sagan warned them not to do! Jerry Bishop, formerly of of The
Wall Street Journal, virtually alone among journalists, continued
to write objective stories about cold fusion
and he was brutally attacked for doing so. He
was at the meeting in 1989 when Sagan spoke. Now he has retired
from the Journal and no one there continues his work.
Shortly before his death, Carl Sagan left us one more
view of cold fusion
all the more tragic, because with the information he had had in
his hands he should have been able to do much better. To be charitable,
perhaps he was just too busy to study the evidence. Sagan, an enormously
influential scientist, was apparently not strong enough to resist
the appalling ignorance of and intolerance to cold fusion in the
scientific community. Though he was still open-minded, for which
he is to be praised, he really had ignored his own 1989 advice.
His words are from Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and
Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Random House, 1997, ISBN
"What I've talked about in the last
paragraph is hot fusion so called for a good reason: You
have to bring materials up to temperatures of millions of degrees
or more, as in the interior of the Sun, to make fusion go. There
have also been claims for something called cold fusion, which
was first announced in 1989. The apparatus sits on a desk; you
put in some kinds of hydrogen, some palladium metal, run an electric
current, and, it is claimed, out comes more energy than you put
in, as well as neutrons and other signs of nuclear reactions.
If only this were true, it might be the ideal solution to global
warming. Many scientific groups all over the world have looked
into cold fusion. If there's any merit to the claim, the rewards,
of course, would be enormous. The overwhelming judgment of the
community of physicists worldwide is that cold fusion is an illusion,
a melange of measurement errors, absence of proper control experiments,
and a confusion of chemical with nuclear reactions. But there
are a few groups of scientists in various nations that are continuing
to look into cold fusion--the Japanese Government, for example,
has support such research at a low level and each claims
should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Maybe some subtle, ingenious new
technology wholly unforeseen at this moment is just
around the corner that will provide tommorow's energy. There have
been surprises before, But it would be foolhardy to bet on it."
(End of Billions and Billions quote
Astute readers of Infinite Energy know very well that
the "surprise" is already here. You can bet on it and win!