It then began to become apparent to those inside MIT that the research report that Parker and Petrasso had disclosed to the press in such detail was not quite what it seemed. That some of those in charge at MIT's Plasma Fusion Centre had embarked on a deliberate policy of ridiculing cold fusion and that to do so they had -- almost incredibly -- fudged the results of their own research.
The MIT study announced by Parker and Petrasso contained two sets of graphs. The first showed the result of a duplicate of the Fleischmann-Pons cell and did, indeed, show inexplicable amounts of heat greater than the electrical energy input. The second set were of a control experiment that used exactly the same type of electrodes, but placed in ordinary 'light' water -- essentially no different than tap water. The results for the control cell should have been zero -- if cold fusion is possible at all, it is conceivable in a jar full of deuterium, but not in a jar of tap water. Any activity here, according to current theory, would simply indicate some kind of chemical, not nuclear, process.
But the MIT results for the control showed exactly the same curve as that of the fusion cell. It was the identical nature of the two sets of results that depicted so graphically to the press and scientific community the baseless nature of the Fleischmann-Pons claim and that justified MIT's statement that it had 'failed to reproduce' those claims. It was these figures that were subsequently used by the Department of Energy to refuse funding for cold fusion and by the U.S. Patent Office to refuse patent applications. It is these figures that are used around the world to silence supporters of cold fusion.
But MIT insiders, like Dr Gene Mallove, knew that the figures had actually been fudged. It is usual for experimental data to be manipulated, usually by computer, to compensate for known factors. No one would have been surprised to learn that MIT had carried out legitimate 'data reduction'. But what they had done was selectively to shift the data obtained from the control experiment, the tap water cell, so that it appeared identical to the output from the fusion cell.
When this blatant fudging of the figures became public, MIT came under fire from many directions, including members of its own staff. Gene Mallove announced his resignation at a public meeting and submitted a letter to MIT accusing them of publishing fudged experimental findings simply to condemn cold fusion. A number of scientific papers were published in scientific journals culminating in the paper published by Fusion Facts in August 1992 by Dr Mitchell Swartz in which he concluded, "What constitutes 'data reduction' is sometimes but not always open to scientific debate. The application of a low pass filter to an electrical signal or the cutting in half of a hologram properly constitute 'data reduction', but the asymmetric shifting of one curve of a paired set is probably not. The removal of the entire steady state signal is also not classical 'data reduction'."
In the restrained and diplomatic language of scientific publications this is as close an anyone ever gets to accusing a colleague of outright fiddling of the figures to make them prove the desired conclusion.
Beleaguered and under fire from every quarter (except the other big hot fusion laboratories who simply became invisible and inaudible) MIT backed down. It added a carefully worded technical appendix to the original study discussing the finer points of error analysis in calorimetry. It also amended its earlier finding of 'unable to reproduce Fleischmann-Pons' to 'too insensitive to confirm' -- a rather different kettle of fish.
Although MIT was caught red handed, it was its original conclusion that stuck both in the public memory and as far as public policy was concerned. The coup de grace was delivered to cold fusion when the U.S. House committee formed to examine the claims for cold fusion, came down on the side of the skeptics.
'Evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive,' said its report. 'No special programmes to establish cold fusion research centres or to support new efforts to find cold fusion are justified.'
