Martin Fleischmann - Biography

Martin Fleischmann (born March 29, 1927) is a British chemist noted for his work in electrochemistry. He came to wider public prominence following his controversial publication of work with colleague Stanley Pons on cold fusion using palladium in the 1980s and '90s.

Early life

Born in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, Fleischmann moved to England in 1938 with his family. He received a PhD from Imperial College London in 1950.

Career

1950s – 1983

Fleischmann went on to teach at King's College, Durham University, which in 1963 became the newly established University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1967, aged 40, Fleischmann became Professor of Electrochemistry at the University of Southampton. From 1970 to 1972, he was president of the International Society of Electrochemists. In 1974, he played an important role in the discovery of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering effect (SERS), and he developed the ultramicroelectrode in the 1980s. In 1979, he was awarded the medal for electrochemistry and thermodynamics by the Royal Society of London. In 1982 he retired from the University of Southampton. In 1985 he received the Palladium Medal from the US Electrochemical Society, and in 1986 was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. He retired from teaching in 1983 and was given an honorary professorship at Southampton University.

Cold fusion

Around 1983, while they were researchers at the University of Utah, he and Stanley Pons found what they believed a way to create nuclear fusion at room temperatures. Fleischmann wanted to publish it first in an obscure journal, and had already spoken with a team that was doing similar work in a different university for a joint publication. The details have not surfaced, but it would seem that the University of Utah wanted to establish priority over the discovery and its patents by making a public announcement before the publication. In an interview with 60 Minutes on April 19, 2009, Fleischmann said that the public announcement was the university's idea, and that he regretted doing it. This decision would later cause heavy criticism against Fleischmann and Pons, being perceived as a breach of how science is usually communicated to other scientists.

On March 23, 1989, it was finally announced at a press conference as "a sustained nuclear fusion reaction," which was quickly labeled by the press as cold fusion– a result previously thought to be unattainable. On March 26 Fleischmann warned on the Wall Street Journal Report not to try replications until a published paper was available two weeks later in Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, but that did not stop hundreds of scientists who had already started work at their laboratories the moment they heard the news on March 23, and more often than not they failed to reproduce the effects. Those who failed to reproduce the claim attacked the pair for fraudulent, sloppy and unethical work, incomplete unreproducible and inaccurate results, and erroneous interpretations. When the paper was finally published, both electrochemists and physicists called it "sloppy" and "uninformative", and it was said that, had Fleischmann and Pons waited for the publication of their paper, most of the trouble would have been avoided because scientists would not have gone so far in trying to test their work. Fleischmann and Pons sued an Italian journalist who had published very harsh criticisms against them, but the judge rejected it saying that criticisms were appropriate given the scientists' behaviour, the lack of evidence since the first announcement, and the disinterest of the scientific community, and that they were an expression of the journalist's "right of reporting". Fleischmann, Pons and the researchers who replicated the effect remain convinced the effect is real, but the general scientific community remains skeptical.

1992 – present

In 1992, Fleischmann moved to France with Pons to continue their work at the IMRA laboratory (part of Technova Corporation, a subsidiary of Toyota), but in 1995 he retired and returned to England.

Fleischmann has more recently co-authored papers with researchers from the U.S. Navy and Italian national laboratories (INFN and ENEA), still on the subject of cold fusion.

In March 2006, "Solar Energy Limited" division "D2Fusion Inc" announced in a press release that Fleischmann, then 79, would be acting as their senior scientific advisor.

Fleischmann suffers from Parkinson's Disease, and lives near Salisbury, England.

Peer-reviewed papers

Conference proceedings

Notes

• Physics Web article by David Voss
• SHAMOO

External links

• Interview: Fusion in a cold climate, 2009, New Scientist