Martin Fleischmann — whose cold fusion experiment briefly made him a household name in 1989 before it was debunked by his fellow scientists — died Aug. 3 at the age of 85.
He earned his PhD from Imperial College London in 1950 and went on to hold teaching and research positions in the UK. He became a prominent scientist in the fields of electrochemistry and thermodynamics and served as president of the International Society of Electrochemists in the early 1970s.
In 1989, the University of Utah announced he and Stanley Pons had found evidence of nuclear fusion at room temperature in an experiment. As explained by Hamish Johnston at physicsworld.com:
“Fusion normally occurs at extremely high temperatures and therefore it was very difficult to understand how the nuclei could overcome the considerable electrostatic repulsion in order to fuse. A popular explanation at the time was that the positive charges of deuterium nuclei within a solid such as palladium were screened by the negatively charged electrons in the metal, thereby allowing two nuclei to get close enough to fuse.”
The unusual public announcement, bypassing the standard peer review process, was widely condemned among other researchers. Things worsened when other scientists failed to reproduce the experiment's results. While a handful of researchers and companies persist (usually describing their subject as a low energy nuclear reaction or LENR), the credibility of cold fusion research has never quite recovered.
Utah's Deseret News reported that Fleischmann and Pons continued their research in France for several years with funding from a Toyota subsidiary that ended in 1997.