Path: santra!tut!draken!kth!mcvax!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wasatch!donn
From: donn@wasatch.utah.edu (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: alt.fusion
Subject: alt.fusion in the news
Summary: comic relief -- how local TV news is treating the fusion story (long)
Message-ID: <1636@wasatch.utah.edu>
Date: 22 Apr 89 05:56:27 GMT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 159

I achieved my allotted minutes of fame on Wednesday, although it was
only two or three minutes total and it went on display in the local
village rather than in the global village.  Alt.fusion received its
first and hopefully only exposure to the regular media.  I don't know
if we need help from local TV news to make alt.fusion seem inane or
banal:

========================================================================
Nourse:  ... spreading all the chitchat around.  News Specialist John
Hollenhorst explains that.

[Cut to CS staff lab, where Seeley walks over to a color HP 9000/370
monitor and sits down.  A pile of HP disks marked with blue Post-It
notes sits next to the monitor; on the wall is the 'Explanation for
Geologic Map of Wyoming', by J D Love and Ann Coe Christiansen.]

Hollenhorst:  If you're a scientist, you have a computer, right?  And
so do thousands of other scientists around the world.  And many of them
are tied together by something called 'Net News', a sort of electronic
'bulletin board'.

[Close-up of subject lines from alt.fusion.]

Lately, Net News has been jammed with news about the hottest story in
science, 'cold fusion'.

[Caption: Donn Seeley, U of U Computer Sciences [sic] Dept.]

Seeley:  Oh, there's incredible excitement, people are starving for
information here.  And one of the reasons why they pay a lot of
attention to this is because the information gets to them fast.

[Close-up of text from an alt.fusion article.]

H:  Some of the computer chitchat is serious, news about the hundreds
of experiments under way around the world, the latest theories on
what's really happening.

[Close-up of Woody Allen quote in Ethan Vishniac's .signature.]

But this hi-tech rumor mill also carries gossip, jokes and wild
speculation about fusion.

[Cut to Seeley, gesturing fatuously.]

S:  Anybody can send anything they want to this and so the actual value
of the article depends on who it came from.

H:  Is some of it not very useful?

S:  A lot of it is not very useful.  A lot of it is very entertaining.

[Caption: John Hollenhorst, Eyewitness News; he sits in Seeley's chair
and points at the screen; cut to close-up of sci.physics article by
Frank Reid.]

H:  Here's an example:  The computer wizards are trying to figure out
what the fusion process should be called once it goes commercial.  This
writer proposes calling it 'Mr Fusion' but he says Pons and
Fleischmann better hurry before they're beaten by Fusion-san, Herr
Fuzion or Comrade Fusion.

[Scene from BACK TO THE FUTURE -- voice-over:]

H:  'Mr Fusion.'  Get it?  You remember, in BACK TO THE FUTURE.

['Wait a minute.  What are you doing, Doc?'  'I need fuel!'  Close-up
of Mr Fusion.]

H:  So now cold fusion has a nickname, borrowed from a movie.

[Cut back to Seeley; close-up of Howard Owen's sci.physics article
touting Mr Fusion as the fair alternative to the P/F vs. F/P Process.]

It also has a fan club of optimistic scientists around the world and a
legion of skeptics, all gossiping up a storm on a world-wide electronic
chatterbox.  John Hollenhorst, Eyewitness News at the University of
Utah.
========================================================================

I haven't the faintest idea who clued Channel 5 in about alt.fusion or
gave them my phone number.  My boss wasn't too happy to see them but we
got away in reasonable shape and with some free publicity besides.

On Thursday night Channel 5 aired a 1-hour fusion special.  This was
remarkably information-free, but it did contain some interesting
non-technical tidbits.

A wonderful quote at the beginning helped to set the tone: 'Stan and I
thought that this experiment was so stupid, we decided to finance it
ourselves,' said Martin Fleischmann.  You'll never guess whom Channel 5
selected as their noted fusion futurist -- none other than Dr Jerry
Pournelle, interviewed live, who gave us another great quote: 'I have
more information in one place than anybody in the world.'  He came up
with at least one wonderfully brainless bit of bragging: he claimed
that cold fusion solves the pollution problem, because given the
energy, he will be able to reduce the waste to its constituent elements.
No one suggested reducing Jerry to his constituent elements, however.

The show went on to look at the competition between the (state-owned)
University of Utah and (church-owned) Brigham Young University.  It
seems that a week or so before the fateful press conference, U of U
president Chase Peterson visited BYU to discuss the rival fusion
projects.  According to (church-owned) Channel 5, Peterson suggested
that the two universities both sit on their discoveries until Nature
published their respective landmark papers in the same issue.  BYU
officials supposedly agreed, and hence they were rather disturbed when
the U conducted a press conference to claim all the glory.  When Channel
5 interviewed the BYU officials for the show, they were quite cynical --
they were sure that money was the main motivation for the early U of U
announcement.  Chase Peterson of course denies that any deal was struck.

Next came a profile of Stanley Pons.  Pons grew up in North Carolina,
did his undergraduate work at Wake Forest University, then went off to
work for his father's textile company.  Eight years later he decided to
return for an advanced degree and enrolled at the University of
Southampton in the UK, where he studied under Martin Fleischmann.  Pons
and Fleischmann became good friends, and when Pons moved to Utah,
Fleischmann came to visit two or three times each year.  The idea for
cold fusion started during one of these visits; Channel 5 showed tape
of Mill Creek Canyon, one of my own favorite hiking places, and gave us
a tour of Pons's kitchen.  Pons enjoys cooking, and he and Fleischmann
would often spend an evening chopping vegetables and scribbling
formulae on a convenient white board.  Pons has two pre-teen kids -- I
think their names are John and Joyce.  (This makes the rumors about
Pons's son and the hole in the concrete rather difficult to believe...)
Pons likes to work on his PC and listen to rock music -- we are told
that his favorite band is Dire Straits.  Pons's wife says that Pons and
Fleischmann discussed the concept of cold fusion for a long time before
actually trying an experiment...

The show went on to interview Utah legislators about the prospects for
the economy in the advent of commercial cold fusion.  It was not a
pretty sight.  Some sample (slightly paraphrased) quotes: 'We wouldn't
have to worry about taxes,' the idea perhaps being that Utah would turn
into another Saudi Arabia with a guaranteed income for all citizens;
'we could fund our whole education system,' as though we won't want to
if cold fusion doesn't work out; 'we can extract all the heavy water we
need from the Salt Lake,' and get free minerals besides, not taking
into account just how corrosive Salt Lake 'water' is to almost all
materials.  You could almost see university and state officials
drooling; it reminded me of a sight I encountered last weekend on my
bike -- two large dogs standing rigidly at attention next to a woman
barbecuing dinner on a hibachi.  Next week Pons and Fleischmann will
testify before Congress on behalf of Rep. Wayne Owens's bill to
establish a fusion technology center in Utah.  Almost makes you forget
about the suggestion made by tax protesters last year that the
University stop doing research and fire redundant faculty to save
money; or for that matter the budget cuts a couple years ago that
called for almost 100 faculty and 200 staff to be laid off.

Gotta run, the Mr Fusion just pinged,

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@cs.utah.edu
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    utah-cs!donn

PS -- Except for the Hollenhorst transcript, which came directly from
the videotape, everything is based on my usual vague and inaccurate
notes, so take it all with a few milligrams of lithium.