26 April 1991 Washington, DC 1. Yesterday, in teams of three or four, APS members visited offices of 54 Senators and 117 Representatives to discuss the importance of science to the Nation. Congressional Day, which grew out of an initiative by the Division of Molecular and Optical Physics, took advantage of the Spring Meeting of the APS in Washington. Brown also hosted a Hill reception last night along with six Nobel Laureate physicists.
Plans are underway to repeat Congressional Day again next year.
From the beginning, physicists marvelled at the robust health of Pons and Fleischmann. At the power levels they claimed from cold fusion cells, even the cockroaches in their lab should have been exterminated by radiation. The explanation, it was revealed in a press conference yesterday in Lancaster, PA, is that there wasn't much fusion going on to begin with. If the shrunken atoms are deuterons, of course, they may fuse from time to time, which explains why cold fusion results are erratic. This remarkable discovery was made by Randy Mills, MD Harvard Medical School, '86 and will be published by Fusion Technology in August.