Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion (Princeton Legacy Library) - Softcover

Close, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 069160620X ISBN 13: 9780691606200

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Frank Close, a leading physicist and talented popular science writer, reveals the true story of the cold fusion controversy--a story ignored until now in spite of the glare of publicity surrounding Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. On March 23, 1989, these two Utah scientists held an astonishing press conference, maintaining that they had succeeded, working in secret, in harnessing atomic fusion. What was the basis for their claims to have achieved cold fusion in a test tube in a basement laboratory, while other scientists--using magnets as big as houses and temperatures hotter than those in the center of the sun--were failing to produce as much power as they were using? Why did Fleischmann and Pons proclaim their "discovery" at a news conference, when first announcements of scientific results are almost always made within the scientific community? Why did the full-blown media event inspired by their initial report cause governments to reorient their research programs in hopes of cornering the "new technology"? And why did some scientists recklessly abandon their traditional painstaking methods in haste to be first to prove or discredit the experiment? Acquainted at first hand with investigations of cold fusion on two continents, Close is uniquely qualified to probe the motivations behind Fleischmann's and Pons's startling assertions and to explore the intellectual and political turmoil that surrounded the cold fusion debate.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Close is Professor of Physics at the Theoretical Physics Department, Oxford University. He gained a DPhil at Oxford University, and has worked at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), CERN, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Professor Close has been awarded the Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics and is the author of many books aimed at both a professional and a lay audience.

From Publishers Weekly

This scholarly expose of the cold fusion controversy, brought public in 1989 at the University of Utah, is two parts chemistry and one part sociology of science as affected by greed. Close ( The Cosmic Onion ), a physicist from Britain's Ritherford Labs and a talented writer, offers a global view of the interactions of the science, politics and personalities involved in what may have been the archetypical science event of the '80s. Lay readers will need their high school chemistry and some physics to follow the detailed chronology of events and players (F. D. Peat's Cold Fusion would be a good reference). The mysteries of matter are often overshadowed by the volatile forces of humans and their institutions in a day-by-day, experiment-by-experiment account that simultaneously meets the tests of good science and good journalism.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 069160620X
• ISBN 13: 9780691606200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 388