Andrew Riley
kiloVolts
Thursday, 15 March 2007
Andrew Riley
Andrew Riley was my closest friend when I was eleven years old, and I think
I was his. We then went to different schools, my parents and I moved to
another part of Ipswich and, although Andrew cycled to see me and I visited
him at home, we had parted company within a year. I remember little about
him: his dark hair, his intelligence, playing Mousetrap with him and
Waddington's Table Soccer, a game which adapted the tiddlywinks technique
and for which Andrew had developed a tactic I could not defeat, only
emulate, leading to many 0-0 draws. A chance meeting ten years on revealed
that we were both doing doctoral research, Andrew in chemistry, but we had
no desire to pick up a lost childhood friendship.
On 2nd January 1992, Andrew was killed in an explosion at SRI International,
the Californian research institute. The group Andrew was part of was
studying cold fusion, the controversial possibility that energy-releasing
nuclear fusion can take place at room temperature. In common with other cold
fusion researchers, they were passing electricity through deuterium oxide,
heavy water, using a palladium cathode. This simple apparatus was enclosed
within a calorimeter so that measurements of heat exchange could be made.
The SRI group had pioneered techniques which enabled measurement to great
precision through innovative uses of digital technology. On this basis, they
hoped to elucidate the arguments which had been surrounding cold fusion,
with its promise of a safe non-polluting energy source, since the late
1980s.
What happened on the 2nd January has been the subject of a number of
investigations and a variety of different accounts exist. Usenet group
rumours rapidly spread that Andrew had died when he manually tried to
release a malfunctioning automatic pressure valve. More conspiratorial
versions exist with suspicions still lingering over why other electrolysis
cells were buried at SRI in the aftermath and why investigators were
prevented from accessing equipment and had sections of reports suppressed.
Formal forensic investigations have been uncertain about what set things off
but agree that the explosion itself was the result of products released from
the electrolysis cell reacting with the atmosphere. An article in the
journal Forensic Science in 1995 grimly reported that some of Andrew's
tissue could be found on the shattered steel of the exploded cell,
indicating the instantaneous nature of the disaster.
Five years ago, on a wet winter day, I decided to walk back into the centre
of Ipswich from an appointment at an out of town opticians rather than take
the bus. I diverted to some childhood locations including the Brunswick Road
Recreation Ground where Andrew and I had played. Much had changed. There
were no see-saws, witches hats or long slides depositing children roughly
onto tarmacadam surfaces. The rec was surrounded on all sides by housing.
The farm whose workers we used to taunt through the boundary fence was gone.
The deep hole, fully 30 metres across, into which all manner of exciting
waste was dumped, just adjacent to where we played and accessible through a
gap in the fence, was filled and a day care centre for the elderly built on
these foundations. The tall trees, which are noted on two hundred year old
maps, had been felled and a number of new ones planted. One of these had a
small plate at its base with lettering affixed. A memorial dedication to
Andrew. In the heavy cold rain, I wept.
A few weeks ago I returned to take photographs and to think about writing a
little about Andrew to launch this blog. The face of the rusting plate no
longer carried the dedication. Andrew's tree stood marked but anonymous. I
took some photographs and walked away wondering what to do. I considered
taking a sheet from my notepad and writing on it Andrew Riley,
Electrochemist, 1958-1992, perhaps attaching it with chewing gum, but I had
none.
I had long been interested in cold fusion as exemplary suborderly science.
It drifts anomalously between other orders of thought, between the everyday
homeliness of room temperature to deathly explosiveness if badly contained,
between messiah and deceiver. As I drafted this account drinking stout in
The Dove, with Andrew's desolate tree much in mind, further thoughts
occupied me. How carefully we have to maintain our acts of commemoration. We
have to remember to remember. People. Places. Events. No history without
diligence.
And from this it is a small move to recognise how tenuous the world of
science can also be. Cold fusion is now an area populated by ageing senior
scientists who can pursue its research off the back of other monies. Funding
bodies are loath to support the field. Young scientists cannot establish
reputations in it. In a recent interview, Andrew's colleague Michael McKubre
notes how cold fusion's scientists and their once vociferous debunkers are
now equally dying out. Soon, perhaps, no one will be able to do the
experiments with the necessary exactness of technique and, if anyone cares,
there may be other fatalities as the know-how is reconstructed.
In an image which haunts and terrifies me from an otherwise dispassionate
forensic report, science itself can be as fleeting as Andrew's grip on the
exploding cell and as legible afterwards as his handprint still attached to
the steel.
Posted by John Bowers at 00:03