13 Things That Don't Make Sense (9 page)

Schwinger’s attitude toward cold fusion is summed up in a talk he wrote but never got to deliver; it was read to a conference
on cold fusion five months after his death. “As Polonius might have said: neither a true-believer nor a disbeliever be,” Schwinger
wrote. “From the very beginning … I have asked myself—not whether Pons and Fleischmann are right—but whether a mechanism
can be identified that will produce nuclear energy by manipulations at the atomic—the chemical—level.”

Schwinger made several attempts to explain the cold fusion results and wrote eight theory papers. None of his theories properly
explained the observations, but he never gave up; for him, it seems, the Pons and Fleischmann results provoked a fascinating
question, one that he pursued until his death. Whether Pons and Fleischmann were right was not the issue; had they highlighted
an issue worth investigating? Could nuclear energy be released by manipulating atoms in chemical processes? The man who had
helped create a theory the
New York Times
hailed as “one of 20th-century physics’ few unqualified triumphs” considered this a question worthy of his remaining years.

This fact alone makes it worth taking cold fusion seriously as an anomaly, and it is worth noting that some of Schwinger’s
early work, too, was driven by his interest in an anomaly. In the years shortly after the end of the Second World War, new
experiments had shown that the “hyperfine” part of the atomic spectrum of hydrogen differed from that predicted by the standard
theoretical model of the time, a model created by the British physicist Paul Dirac. Schwinger was enthralled—but cautious.
The Harvard physicist Norman Ramsey, one of the experimentalists involved in highlighting the original anomaly, recalls that
Schwinger didn’t want to waste his time if it was all a fuss about nothing.

Schwinger invited me to lunch and asked me searching questions about the reliability of the experimental hyperfine anomaly.
He said he thought he could explain it, but would have to develop a relativistic QED; he was worried about doing all that
work if the hyperfine anomaly wasn’t real. I told him I was convinced it was real. He then worked vigorously on this problem.

On December 30, 1947, the journal
Physical Review
received an explanation for the anomaly. It required a novel combination of Einstein’s relativity and the new theory of quantum
electrodynamics. The journal duly published Schwinger’s paper. It was the first application of
relativistic QED
, now an essential component of modern physics. If Schwinger was concerned to make sure the hydrogen spectrum anomaly was
real before he invested too much time in the project, it seems likely he had also convinced himself that the cold fusion results
were similarly worthy of his attention.

Science is not about people, though, and true anomalies stand by themselves because they don’t go away. Cold fusion research
has survived Schwinger’s death, Miles’s retirement, and Pons and Fleischmann’s public excoriation: in 2004, a Department of
Energy (DoE) study admitted that there might be something to cold fusion claims after all and recommended that “funding agencies
should entertain individual, well-designed proposals” for cold fusion experiments.

This report was the result of the first examination of the evidence accumulated since the hastily compiled ERAB report of
1989. Things had certainly changed since then: the navy researchers, for instance, had released a two-volume report covering
a decade of their research. What was perhaps most interesting, though, was how one of the original—and most damning—reports
on Pons and Fleischmann’s claims had been amended.

When Pons and Fleischmann first made their claims, there were three front-runners in the race to confirm or refute cold fusion.
The results from MIT, Caltech, and the United Kingdom’s Harwell Laboratory would be influential enough to outweigh results—positive
or negative—from any other laboratories anywhere in the world. When all three of these heavyweights reported that they had
failed to see any excess heat, it was all over for cold fusion.

The report from MIT wasn’t exactly accurate, however. The MIT researchers have since admitted that their attempt to replicate
Pons and Fleischmann’s work did produce more heat than they had expected. Although the evidence never made it into the published
report, an appendix added after publication documented excess heat.

This turnaround came to light after MIT’s chief science writer, Eugene Mallove, received the MIT final paper. It was dated
July 13, 1989, and showed no excess heat, a result that damned cold fusion. Mallove was then given an earlier draft of the
same paper, detailing the outcome of the same experiments. It was dated July 10, and its data showed excess heat. In those
three days, the data had apparently been changed from showing excess heat to showing none. Mallove lodged an official complaint,
then resigned in protest.

Mallove’s charges resulted in the appendix being added to the MIT report. It made no difference to the ERAB report because
the report had already been presented to Congress as evidence that Pons and Fleischmann had no basis for their claims, but
at least the record now shows that the heat graph had been altered. It had happened because the research team had decided
that excess heat was not the smoking gun; it was a sudden release of heat that mattered, and their heat release had not been
sudden enough. But it seems that they never had much confidence in their data either way; in Mallove’s report about the affair,
10 Years That Shook Physics
, he recalls how Professor Ronald R. Parker of MIT’s Plasma Fusion Laboratory publicly stated the calorimetry data were “worthless.”

Calorimetry—the science of measuring heat—is known to be the hardest of sciences, and it is worth pointing out that calorimetry
data are just as unhelpful today: according to the navy researchers, there is still no cold fusion experiment that has reliably
and repeatedly produced a measurable excess of heat. Nonetheless, the last fifteen years of research have changed the picture
enough for the DoE panel to concede there is something worth looking at in cold fusion. In the years since the DoE report
came out, there has been a further breakthrough, too. The cold fusioneers now have reliable evidence that, whatever the calorimetry
considerations, some kind of nuclear reactions are definitely going on in their experiments.

TO
get energy out of atoms, you either have to break up their cores—a process called
nuclear fission
—or join different atoms together by nuclear fusion. Both processes liberate energy, but they also create a range of byproducts
that depend on what atoms you’re using, and whether they are fusing or splitting. Many of those by-products are high-energy
particles that shoot out of the reaction, and they can be detected.

Nuclear scientists use a plastic called CR39 to expose nuclear events. CR39 is the same kind of plastic that is used in eyeglass
lenses. Place a piece next to a chamber containing nuclear reactions, and the particles flying out will break up molecular
bonds in the polymer, creating a telltale pattern of microscopic pits and scratches. This pattern is like a fingerprint: if
you know what you’re doing, it’s a fairly straightforward piece of detective work to look at the pattern and deduce what kinds
of particles hit the plastic chip, and what energy they were traveling with. And that can tell you what kind of reaction was
going on in the chamber.

Navy researchers have put CR39 chips—they look like microscope slides—into their cold fusion cells and given them to a couple
of independent nuclear track specialists to look at. The specialists were convinced they were looking at the signature of
a nuclear event. Put a CR39 chip next to a piece of depleted uranium, a radioactive metal, and it will become covered with
random lines and concentric circles. Put one in a cold fusion experiment, and it ends up looking the same.

It may not sound like much, but the CR39 chips provide almost incontestable evidence that whatever is going on inside those
simple experiments, nuclear reactions are involved. That’s a big deal, and, as well as allowing them to come out and talk
confidently to the navy’s top brass about what they’ve been doing, the CR39 chip data have netted the cold fusion researchers
their first publication in a major mainstream journal in many years. In June 2007 the findings were published in
Naturwissenschaften
, a journal that also published work by a certain Albert Einstein. The CR39 data have also convinced the navy to fund further
research into cold fusion.

What they still don’t have, though, is reliable evidence of extra energy. They make no claims of anomalous heat production
or of nuclear fusion. In fact, they don’t even use the
f
-word but refer to what is going on in their experiments as
low energy nuclear reactions
. In many ways, that is exceedingly frustrating: in cold fusion, calorimetry is everything—excess heat is what it is all about.
Nonetheless, we have to accept what we have. For now, all the cold fusion anomaly has is the CR39 data. Maybe it will lead
to a clean, virtually inexhaustible form of energy; maybe it won’t. But we can say this: load palladium with heavy hydrogen
molecules, pass a current through it, and some kind of nuclear reaction appears to take place.

One of the few publications to get immediate perspective on the original cold fusion debacle was the
Economist
. A month after Pons and Fleischmann’s 1989 announcement, it said the affair was “exactly what science should be about.” Even
if the pair were wrong, there was no harm done; complaints about wasting time and money were cowardly reactions. Pons and
Fleischmann had provided “excitement and inspiration in abundance.” It seems almost laughably naive in the light of what followed,
but the
Economist
was right: the research is what science should be about, and it has led us somewhere. What is clear, what is now more than
a maybe, is that nuclear processes can be unlocked without a great drama of fire and storm. As we develop our understanding
of nuclear physics beyond what’s currently described by the theory known as quantum electrodynamics, the setup of the cold
fusion experiments may one day prove to have been a fortuitous leap in the dark that catapulted us into a new age of nuclear
science.

Perhaps Joseph Priestley has the most appropriate perspective here. During his lifetime, Priestley discovered oxygen and,
by accident, invented carbonated water. “In this business,” he once said, “more is owed to what we call chance—that is, to
the observation of events arising from unknown causes—than to any preconceived theory.” The story of cold fusion has been
a debacle; it began with an attempt to probe a profound theory and has generated little more than scandal, exposing the worst
sides of human nature (and the human nature of science). But it is not over yet, and there are signs that it could still yield
something worthwhile, something that will eclipse its checkered history and make us glad that, before they became scientific
curiosities, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons were simply curious.

5

LIFE

Are you more than just a bag of chemicals?

S
o far, we have looked at anomalies that have ranged from the grand scale to the smallest: from the ultimate nature of the
universe to the nature of atomic nuclei. The implications have ranged from discerning the ultimate fate of the cosmos to harnessing
a new form of energy on Earth. None, however, can be as fundamentally significant to humans as the implications of our next
anomaly. It is so important that the Santa Fe complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman has said coming to grips with it could open
the door to a whole new science. What is it? You know it best as the thing we call life.

In some ways, it’s difficult to see life as an anomaly. But perhaps that is a contempt born of familiarity. Stop taking it
for granted, and think for a moment about what sets the biological world apart from the world of nonliving matter. As scientific
observations go, it’s a cast-iron case: plenty of stuff has that quality we call
alive
. We also see plenty of stuff around us that no one would call alive. But no scientist on Earth can tell you where the fundamental
difference between these two states lies. Neither can any of them take something from the not-alive state and turn it into
something that everyone would agree is alive. In fact, scientists are still struggling to agree on what would even constitute
such a step.

We are composed of molecules whose individual behavior and properties can be described by science—quantum theory provides
the root explanation. Somehow, though, these molecules are put together in a way that results in properties that defy explanation
by any theory. We recognize those properties as the thing we call
life.
But in many ways that’s no more enlightening than the label
dark energy
is to cosmologists. As Erwin Schrödinger, the father of quantum theory, asked in 1944, “What is life?”

The answer that most scientists favor is “nothing special.” There is no reason to believe something ethereal or spiritual,
some “vital spark” switches on life in an assembly of molecules. There is also no reason to think the question is somehow
beyond the scope of science, a mystical or philosophical phenomenon. There is, they say, no reason to think we can’t find
the answer. It’s just that, at the moment, we’re not sure where or even how to look.

There are many ways to try to unravel the essential nature of life. One is to find out how it started: trace the tree of life
back to the point where all that existed was chemistry. Another is to try to build something that is “alive” from scratch:
take some chemicals and put them together in ways that might make them come alive. A third option is to sit and think about
what exactly it is that marks the difference between living and nonliving matter and come up with the definition of
life.
It is this latter path that is perhaps the most well trodden. It is also the one widely admitted to be a dead end.

How would you define
life
? Is it when a system reproduces itself? If that is the case, plenty of computer programs could be called alive, while plenty
of people—sterile men and women, for example, or nuns—could not. Things that are alive consume fuel, move around, and excrete
waste products, but so do automobiles, and no one would call them alive.

Schrödinger came to the conclusion that life is the one system that turns the natural progression of entropy, moving from
order to disorder, on its head; living things are, effectively, machines that create order from disorder in their environment.
This, to him, was the essence of the process that staves off the state of death. It is still not enough, though; a candle
flame creates order from disorder in its environment and is patently not alive.

The physicist Paul Davies has perhaps done most to try to elucidate a definition of
life
, but he too remains stumped for a final answer. Instead, he considers life to have various characteristics, none of which
defines
life
in and of itself, and many of which can also be seen in nonliving matter. In his award-wining book
The Fifth Miracle
, Davies lists these attributes—and their failings—as explanations or descriptions of life, rather than definitions. A living
being metabolizes, processing chemicals to gain itself energy (as does Jupiter’s Great Red Spot). It reproduces itself (but
mules don’t, and bush fires and crystals do). It has organized complexity—that is, it is composed of interdependent complex
systems such as arteries and legs (in this way it is rather like modern cars). It grows and develops (as does rust). It contains
information—and passes that information on (like computer viruses). Life also shows a combination of permanence and change—evolution
through mutation and selection. Finally, and perhaps most convincingly for Davies, living beings are autonomous; they determine
their own actions.

Others have added to this list. A living system must also be contained within a boundary that is part of the system, according
to the biologist Lynn Margulis. Whichever way you look at it, though, the definition—or rather the series of suggestions and
characteristics—is too vague to be really useful. In fact, attempts to define
life
are beginning to be seen as damaging. In June 2007 an editorial in the journal
Nature
declared that

one might have hoped that such perceptions of a need for a qualitative difference between inert and living matter—such vitalism—would
have been interred alongside the pre-darwinian belief that organisms are generated spontaneously from decaying matter. Scientists
who regard themselves as well beyond such beliefs nevertheless bolster them when they attempt to draw up criteria for what
constitutes “life.”

The editorial was heralding the achievements of
synthetic biology
: the attempt to build life from its chemical components. This, in the establishment view, is the way forward for dealing
with the fact that life does not fit into any existing modes of understanding. The question of whether it can succeed, though,
is still wide-open.

THE
first researchers to make a significant move toward creating life were the University of Chicago chemists Stanley Miller and
Harold C. Urey. In 1953 they sealed ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water in a flask to mimic the Earth’s primordial atmosphere.
Then they put sparks of electricity through the mixture. The idea was that lightning storms may have sparked primordial Earth’s
chemicals into creating the first life.

The experiment was an extraordinary success. After a week of continuous electrical discharge, around 2 percent of the methane’s
carbon had turned into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. It was a revelation.

The trouble is, the experiment was flawed. The gases Miller and Urey used are not the ones scientists now think were present
in the primordial atmosphere. In fact, the fundamental chemical characteristics of the mixture may have been entirely wrong.
What’s more, the stuff of Earth life—proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids—didn’t show up. The New York University
chemistry professor Robert Shapiro likened the experiment’s production of amino acids to the accidental production of the
phrase
to be
during a random attack on a typewriter’s keys; it doesn’t mean the rest of
Hamlet
is going to follow. “Any sober calculation of the odds reveals that the chances of producing a play or even a sonnet in this
way are hopeless,” he says, “even if every atom of material on Earth were a typewriter that had been turning out text without
interruption for the past four and a half billion years.”

So, it’s hard to call the Miller-Urey experiment a true success. Nevertheless, it showed what might be possible. And in 1961
the Catalonian Juan Oro went even further. Oro put water, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia together and produced large amounts
of adenine. Not only is adenine one of the four building blocks of DNA; it is also a major component of adenosine triphosphate
(ATP), the chemical that provides the fuel for biology to work. You don’t run, grow, or even breathe without using up ATP.

The Nobel Prize–winning Flemish biologist Christian de Duve once said that “life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace
manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.”
If it really is that simple to make amino acids and adenine, perhaps it is easy to get life started. There is a good reason
to take this viewpoint seriously: the astonishing rapidity with which life got going on Earth.

In the center of the Pilbara region of northwestern Australia, the Sun beats down on red rocks that were formed by the planet’s
first creatures. They are extraordinary formations, resembling egg cartons and upside-down ice cream cones, and their arrangement
and shape tell us they were laid down as sediment excreted by microbes 3.5 billion years ago. Which means their shape is not
the only extraordinary thing.

Our solar system formed just 4.55 billion years ago. For millennia afterward, it was a hellish maelstrom of asteroids and
comets; huge rocks hurtled through space and pounded the planets and moons. According to our best ideas of how things came
to be as they are on our planet, a rock the size of Mars slammed into the primordial Earth. The impact turned the planet’s
surface to liquid and sent a blob of molten rock into orbit—a blob that eventually became our silvery Moon.

The surface of Earth would have taken tens of millions of years to cool from that cataclysmic impact, and further impacts
would have slowed the cooling. Studying the Moon’s craters, formed only once the surface had hardened, tells us that the asteroid
and comet storm only began to abate about 3.8 billion years ago. Only then could life begin; it seems it took the Pilbara
microbes only around 300 million years to come into existence.

The cosmologist and astronomer Carl Sagan took the rapidity of life’s emergence as proof that it can’t be that hard to make.
“As soon as conditions were favorable, life began amazingly fast on our planet,” he wrote in an essay for the Planetary Society’s
Bioastronomy News
in 1995. “The origin of life must be a highly probable circumstance; as soon as conditions permit, up it pops!” Sagan, who
died a year later of myelodysplasia, a bone marrow disorder linked to leukemia, was led to conclude that life is extremely
likely to exist elsewhere in the universe.

Many of today’s biologists draw what is perhaps a more self-centered conclusion: if life pops up so easily, we ought to be
able to make it. Most scientists working in this field agree that the task facing them is achievable; it is a matter of when,
not if, they will create artificial life. After all, if it happened once—when a bolt of lightning happened to hit the right
bowl of primordial soup—surely the collective power of today’s biotechnologists can make it happen again. Launching Life 2.0
surely can’t be that difficult.

Such bullish attitudes don’t take account of our ignorance, however. For more than a decade, scientists have been sure they
are on the cusp of working out exactly how life arose from its chemical constituents. But it’s not clear that we’re any closer
to that achievement today than we were ten years ago. If creating life is “simply” a matter of putting the right chemicals
together under the right conditions, there’s still no consensus about what “right” actually is—for the chemicals or the conditions.

AFTER
the first atomic bomb was tested in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s chief scientist,
made only one audible comment: “It worked.” Yet, in an extraordinary piece of newsreel footage filmed years later, he admitted
that his mind had been filled with much deeper thoughts at the time. Barely containing his emotions, looking down—almost at
the floor—and wiping a tear from his eye, he recalls the moment.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the
line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to
impress him takes on his multiarmed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought
that one way or another.

If ever there were to be another world-changing moment as profound as that bomb test, it would surely be the first time humans
bring inanimate matter to life. In the middle of the New Mexico desert, Steen Rasmussen is attempting to do just that in his
labs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. If Rasmussen’s project works—if the “Los Alamos Bug” ever comes to life—it will
redefine our position in the universe. The thing we call life will cease to be an anomaly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rasmussen has been accused of playing God; there have even been suggestions his project should be
halted. If he wants to dissipate any such concerns, all he has to do is list a couple of the ingredients of the Los Alamos
Bug. His recipe for life will take a different path from that taken by the Pilbara microbes—and everything else on Earth.
In fact, some would say the Los Alamos Bug isn’t life, but a little ball of soap. Basically, it’s a fleck of washing powder:
soap plus a light-sensitive compound rather like the stuff that makes your shirt glow whiter than white. As Rasmussen wryly
points out, you could buy the ingredients at your local grocery store. Hardly the stuff of sci-fi nightmares.

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