On March 24, 1989, I picked up the Wall Street Journal and had one of
the biggest shocks in my life. I read about cold fusion. I distinctly
remember thinking:
* If this is real, it changes everything. As a scientist remarked a
few weeks later, if true it is the most important discovery since fire.
* It may be a mistake, but senior professors do not usually hold a
press conference to announce such extraordinary findings unless they
have checked carefully and they are pretty sure they are right.
I believe I understood even then that they must be talking about some
sort of aneutronic fusion, which is even more astounding than fusion,
and far more useful. I learned a good deal about nuclear fusion in
college, informally, because my roommate was a grad student who was
working on a small plasma fusion reactor. I do not have the original
Wall Street Journal article handy now, and I do not recall if it
mentioned the "dead graduate student" problem, but it was clear that
this was a test tube experiment that produced heat. I knew that meant
there should have been massive radiation.
What ran through my mind then were the words from the prologue of
Clarke's "Childhood's End" describing the invasion of Earth by a
fleet of extraterrestrial spacecraft:
"This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present
sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen,
parent cliffs, and go sailing out to sea in lonely pride."
- Jed
- [Vo]:A memory of March 1989 and Arthur C. Clarke Jed Rothwell
-
