Luogocomune - Forum - Generico 11 settembre - Steven Jones stava inventando la Fusione Fredda?

Ecco qua:

Physicists Debunk Claim Of a New Kind of Fusion

The criticism at the regular spring meeting of the society came just before Dr. Pons was scheduled to meet with representatives of President Bush and just after the University of Utah asked Congress to provide $25 million to pursue Dr. Pons's research. A university spokesman said Dr. Pons was in Washington and could not be reached to answer questions.

Cold fusion, Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann said, can be initiated in a cell containing heavy water, in whose molecules the heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium is substituted for ordinary hydrogen. When current is passed through the heavy water from a palladium cathode, the Utah team said, the palladium absorbs deuterium atoms, which are forced to fuse, generating heat and neutrons.

...

Some of the new experiments also sought to reproduce the less contentious findings on cold fusion reported independently by Dr. Steven E. Jones and his colleagues at Brigham Young University in Utah. Dr. Jones, who used a device similar to the one in the Pons-Fleischmann experiment, did not claim that any useful energy was produced. But he did report that slightly more neutrons were detected while the cell was operating than could be expected from normal sources. The result suggests at least the possibility of fusion, he said, although it is not likely to be useful as an energy source.

Physicists who have investigated Dr. Jones's report have been fairly restrained in their criticism, acknowledging that Dr. Jones is a careful scientist. But from the outset they have expressed profound skepticism of claims by Dr. Fleischmann and Dr. Pons.
__________________

Da wikipedia invece:

Pons-Fleischmann experiment

The grant proposal was turned over to several people for peer review, including Steven Jones of Brigham Young University. Jones had worked on muon-catalyzed fusion for some time, and had written an article on the topic entitled "Cold Nuclear Fusion" that had been published in Scientific American, July 1987. He had since turned his attention to the problem of fusion in high-pressure environments, believing that fusion in the metallic hydrogen core of Jupiter might be responsible for the higher-than-normal temperatures of that planet. Paul Palmer noted that the same mechanism might explain the high interior temperature of the Earth (hotter than could be explained without nuclear reactions), and the unusually high concentrations of helium-3 around volcanoes, which implied some sort of nuclear reaction within. Jones started studying high-pressure fusion, which he referred to as piezonuclear fusion, by working with diamond anvils; but he had since moved to electrolytic cells similar to those being worked on by Pons and Fleischmann. In order to characterize the reactions, Jones had spent considerable time designing and building a neutron counter, one able to accurately measure the tiny numbers of neutrons being produced in his experiments.

Both teams were in Utah, but did not know of each other's work until the peer review. After that, they met on several occasions to discuss sharing work and techniques. During this time Pons and Fleischmann described their experiments as generating considerable "excess energy", excess in that it could not be explained by chemical reactions alone. If this were true, their device would have considerable commercial value. Jones was measuring neutron flux instead and seems to have considered it primarily of scientific interest, not commercial. In order to avoid problems in the future, the teams apparently agreed to simultaneously publish their results, although their accounts of their March 6 meeting differ.

In mid-March both teams were ready to publish, and Fleischmann and Jones were to meet at the airport on March 24 to both hand in their papers at the exact same time. However Pons and Fleischmann then "jumped the gun," and held their press conference the day before. Jones, apparently furious at being "scooped," faxed in his paper to Nature as soon as he saw the press announcements. The rush to publish perhaps did as much to muddy the field as any scientific aspects.