Synopsis
The Believers tells the strange story of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, chronologically documenting the summer of 1989 as well as new developments today. The tale includes mystery, scandal, personal tragedy, and scientific wonder.
Understanding of events shifts depending on who is telling the story. A mixture of interviews, vérité footage, archival media, scientific animation, and reenactments will compliment interviews with scientists, journalists, politicians, and officials. Woven together, they paint a vivid, often contradicting account of what happened.
Martin Fleischmann is at the core of the story, both as a fiery intellect in 1989 who achieved near rock-star status and a musing, evasive recluse who today suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has become the figurehead of the small band of aging scientists who still pursue cold fusion experiments. The film explores basement laboratories in New Mexico, Illinois, and California where these believers continue to work, desperate to prove their detractors wrong while wondering if the field will survive when they retire. A high school whiz kid fires up an experiment in his basement, and a Hollywood-based internet radio DJ fills the airwaves with what he believes is really going on behind Cold Fusion research.
Cold fusion scientists and their detractors - the physicists - each claim the other side is blinded by desire. These physicists claim the cold fusionists so desperately want to be right that they overlook fundamental truths about the nature of the atom; cold fusionists claim the physicists are so sure of their facts that they have lost the ability to question them. No definitive answer is presented, so the viewer must determine what --- and whom --- to believe.
The film will first focus on the fateful announcement of cold fusion and the breathless aftermath as the world contemplates a solution to the looming energy crisis. Interviews with university administrators, scientists, and journalists will bolster international news stories, press conferences, and congressional records as the world hungrily welcomed news of an unlimited source of energy.
Then media stories show the euphoria begin to crumble. “Scientists began to smell blood,” states writer Robert Parks. Physicists condemn the experiment, supporters become disillusioned, and the media turns hostile.
Fleischmann and Pons refuse to be questioned, accusations of fraud surface, and revelations lead to the conclusion that the two chemists made mistakes and were perhaps even deluded. We meet the modern day Dr. Fleischmann and learn why he and Dr. Pons fled the country in the aftermath of the scandal. At the end of the second act, the pair has been disgraced, and cold fusion is declared dead by mainstream science.
Or is it? The film introduces a group of scientists who, despite professional ridicule and a dearth of resources, are still pursuing cold fusion experiments across the country in basement labs. Under-funded, ignored by mainstream science, and reaching the end of their lives and careers, they work feverishly, desperately hoping for a breakthrough. Excited by renewed interest in their field sparked by the 20
th anniversary of the announcement, they attend a cold fusion conference in Rome to present their experiments, hopeful that a new presidential administration might signal a shift in attitude towards their long-derided field, and wishful that more young people like the whiz kid from Michigan will take up their cause. The internet DJ laments the fact that Hollywood stars haven't supported Cold Fusion with their celebrity --- or their cash --- blaming the banks for suppressing the real truth behind Cold Fusion's failure.
Meanwhile, journalists wonder why cold fusionists insist on “banging their heads against a series of brick walls.” Simultaneously, Fleischmann fights for his health at the sprawling New Jersey mansion of Irving Dardik, a cold fusion devotee and disgraced physician who claims he can apply his “ground-breaking” fusion research to stop Parkinson’s disease, curing cold fusion’s founding father with the same radical principals that he will use to finally demonstrate that cold fusion is a reality. Between “super-wave therapy” sessions, Fleischmann ruminates on the bitter falling-out he had with his former friend and colleague. “I would have continued working with him,” he says. “It’s not natural to have such a falling-out.”
Risk, and its consequences, resonates through the heart of The Believers. Why did these two prominent scientists risk everything on a difficult, unproven experiment? Was a potential discovery worth their reputations, careers, friendships, and even their families’ safety?
For the first time, viewers will find out the real story behind The Believers.
