Re: Challenging the laws of physics

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

> > IIRC, Pons & Fleishmann rushed into print BECAUSE a paper from the
> > muonium measurements was coming out soon.
>
> Umm.  Not quite:
>
> Neither P&F nor Jones knew about the other until Jones received a P&F paper
> to peer review.  Because Jones also had _his_ paper in preparation, to be
> fair, BYU contacted the UU and a deal was struck that both parties would
> submit via FedEx iirc their papers (P&F a revised paper) on the same day --
> P&F jumped the gun by a day or two -- so that they might conceivably have a
> claim of sorts for prior publication  toward a Prise.

Jones's work on negative muon catalyzed fusion was sufficiently
well known that a Scientific American article completely revealing
it had already appeared several years before the Pons & Fleischmann
flap in 1989. (I can't find the article just now.) The process had
been seen earlier by Luis Alvarez. The earliest reference I can
find in my library is to a New York Times article dated 29 December
1956. It begins:

         Atomic Energy Produced by New, Simpler Method
      ____________________________________________________
      Coast Scientists Achieve Reaction Without Uranium or
      Intense Heat - Practical Use Hinges on Further Tests
      ____________________________________________________
       MONTEREY, Calif., Dec. 28 - A third and revolutionary
      way to produce a nuclear reaction was described here
      today. It does not involve uranium, as in the fission
      reaction, or million-degree heat, as in the fusion
      reaction.
       The new process is called "catalyzed nuclear
      reaction." It was discovered accidentally a few weeks
      ago during routine work with the huge atom-smashing
      bevatron at the University of California radiation
      laboratory...*

There is also evidence that Sakharov had predicted the phenomenon
as early as 1948, but he did not publish.

Leigh

*Full article appears in "Discovering Alvarez", ed. by W. Peter
Trower, University of Chicago Press, p. 155. I was a student in
Alvarez's nuclear physics class at Cal when this article appeared.