Phenomenon: The Lost Archives

LatestS1 • E14 - HeavyWatergate: The War Against Cold Fusion

On March 23, 1989, respected chemists, Dr. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleishman made an announcement that rocked the world of science. Their tabletop experiments with heavy water, a renewable resource readily available in ocean water, yielded enormous amounts of heat energy. Appropriately named, "Cold Fusion," this breakthrough challenged many basic scientific concepts. In response, a group of powerful physicists, heavily reliant upon government funding for their hot fusion research, leveled an unprecedented smear campaign against Pons, Fleishman and the entire field of Cold Fusion science. Was the discovery of Fire From Water too good to be true? Or was it the discovery of the millennium?

46m · 1 Jan 1998