Back to the Future The Fleischmann-Pons Effect in 1994

Abstract

From its initial public announcement on 23 March 1989, the Fleischmann-Pons Effect (FPE) has been attributed to: nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, exotic chemistry, some previously unidentified law of nature, instrumental error. Highly public as well as private efforts were made in 1989 to decide if an FPE existed and if so, what caused it. This paper reevaluates some of the factual bases for the scientific and management judgments of 1989 with the advantage of what has been learned after four years of worldwide experimentation and analysis. We conclude that there is an FPE and its signature is heat. Data existed in 1989 that could have lead to this conclusion. The source of the excess heat is still not understood. Scientific progress was not made through this debate, which was largely uninformed by appropriate experimentation, and patent considerations may have played a determining role in the scientific progress associated with the FPE.