CHAPTER 1
THE MELTDOWN
the March 23， 1989， press release announcing the discovery of
cold fusion， Stan Pons noted that the odds of successfully generating a
nuclear fusion reaction in a test tube were a billion to one against. He also
said that the experiment， in theory， \"made perfectly good scientific
sense.\" Thus he and Martin Fleischmann had initiated their paradoxical
exercise in nuclear research \"for the fun of it\" and to satisfy scientific
curiosity. Once they performed the experiment， however， they had
\"immediate indication that it worked.\"
When asked at the press conference what this evidence was--\"when
you discovered that this one chance in a billion comes through，\" as a
reporter phrased the question--Fleischmann told how they had induced
what appeared to be a nuclear meltdown in a cube of palladium. \"The
thing which really triggered the whole thing offfairly early on，\" Fleisch-
mann said， \"was that we realized that you could generate a lot of heat，
a lot.\"
For Pons and Fleischmann， \"the meltdown\" or\"the explosion，\" as it
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