Google ran a secret experiment to search for cold fusion. Did they find it?

A non-working cold fusion apparatus

at the San Diego Naval Warfare 

Center. Source: Wikipedia

The journal Nature last week revealed the results of a 4-year, $10 million experiment to test cold fusion. The experiments were kept secret in order to avoid the negative publicity that cold fusion attracted when it burst upon the scene 30 years ago.

I've been talking to a few non-scientists about this, and it appears that many people don't know about the cold fusion saga, so here's a quick recap: back in 1989, two chemists at the University of Utah, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, held a press conference to announce a startling discovery: they had generated fusion energy at room temperature. If true, this would have been a profound, civilization-changing discovery: cold fusion had the potential to provide nearly free energy to the entire world, eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels and promising unheard-of economic and environmental benefits.

[A physics aside for those who might be curious: fusion energy is produced when two atoms are smashed together to form a new, heavier atom. Four hydrogen atoms can be fused to form one helium atom, for example. A tiny bit of mass is converted to energy in the process, and that tiny amount produces enormous amounts of energy, as given by Einstein's famous equation, E=MC². Fusion is the process that powers the sun and other stars, but humans have never been able to control it. It's also the source of the energy released by a thermonuclear bomb. The only nuclear energy we humans can control is fission, which is what nuclear power plants use. And the only fusion we know about requires crazily high temperatures, which is why room temperature would be "cold."]

Unfortunately for Pons and Fleischmann, whose reputations were forever tarnished, the 1989 experiments were fatally flawed. Many scientists tried to reproduce the results, but they all failed, and the criticism mounted quickly. Pons and Fleischmann never published their findings, and cold fusion later became a meme for flawed or impossible scientific results. Even today, calling something "cold fusion" is form of ridicule.

Despite the dramatic failure 30 years ago, cold fusion isn't fundamentally impossible, unlike homeopathy, acupuncture, reiki, or other forms of pseudoscience. Fusion is a very real phenomenon, and no one really knows if it might be possible to sustain a fusion reaction at low temperatures, or what those temperature limits might be. This is what led Google and the scientific team they funded to give cold fusion another serious look.

The new Google-funded experiments were run by a team of about 30 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors. The seven leaders of the team, who include scientists from UBC, MIT, the University of Maryland, LBL, and Google, described their findings in a paper just published in Nature. After four years of careful experiments, they conclude:

"So far, we have found no evidence of anomalous effects claimed by proponents of cold fusion."

In other words, they couldn't get cold fusion to work. They tried 3 different experimental setups that have been proposed by others, but despite their best efforts, nothing produced any signs of fusion energy.

The news isn't all negative. The scientists emphasized that in the course of trying to produce cold fusion, they had to design new instrumentation and study new types of materials that have received little attention before now. They wrote:

"... evaluating cold fusion led our programme to study materials and phenomena that we otherwise might not have considered. We set out looking for cold fusion, and instead benefited contemporary research topics in unexpected ways."

They cite go on to say:

"Finding breakthroughs requires risk taking, and we contend that revisiting cold fusion is a risk worth taking."

I have to agree with them here. As the scientists themselves pointed out, even though their experiments didn't produce cold fusion, "this exploration of matter far from equilibrium is likely to have a substantial impact on future energy technologies." In other words, if we keep trying, who knows what we might find?