The bizarre saga of Rusi Taleyarkhan (which I’ve mentioned before) keeps getting stranger. Previously, Purdue University had announced that it conducted an investigation of Taleyarkhan’s work and cleared him of any misconduct, without saying, well, anything much about the investigation. Now, after pressure from Congress on the question, the New York Times reports that they’re opening a new investiagation.
The letter from Congress that triggered this contains the first real details of the earlier investigation, including this absolutely boggling couple of paragraphs:
Up to now, Purdue has focused on two scientific papers published in 2005 that Dr. Taleyarkhan hailed as independent confirmation of his sonofusion results. But the experiments, performed in February 2004, were done using Dr. Taleyarkhan’s apparatus at Purdue, not at an independent laboratory, and one of the authors, Yiban Xu, joined Dr. Taleyarkhan’s group as a postdoctoral researcher a few months later. A second author, Adam Butt, a graduate student, also joined Dr. Taleyarkhan’s group.
Further, in response to a fact-finding committee convened by the nuclear engineering school, Mr. Butt signed a statement that he did not participate in any of the experiments or the analysis of the data and that he had been added as an author to one of the papers a week before submission and was not aware that he was on the second paper until a week before it was presented at a conference. Dr. Xu declined to answer questions about the papers, but the committee noted similarities between them and several of Dr. Taleyarkhan’s.
I really didn’t think this could get weirder. Meanwhile, Taleyarkhan is attempting to play the race card:
Dr. Taleyarkhan said last night in an e-mail message that the subcommittee’s report represents “a gross travesty of justice.” He asked, “Where are the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the Asian community during this episode that has caused this biased and openly one-sided smear campaign?”
But, hey, he’s got Brian Josephson on his side. Pity he’s the sort of supporter you’d rather have lurking in email.
This whole thing is just kind of sad. When I first heard the story, I thought there was probably something real and interesting going on in the experiments. The failure of other experiments to confirm any of the findings was sort of disappointing, but Taleyarkhan’s explanations and follow-up experiments are just loaded with kook signifiers. If he wanted to convince people there was something dodgy going on here, he couldn’t do much better than he’s done.
I’m still inclined to believe that they really saw something with an actual physical explanation, but the chances that it was really fusion seem vanishingly small at this point.