Charles Platt is one of my favorite writers (Do a search on his name in the Wired magazine archives for some excellent articles he's written over the years).
For Make Vol 3, Charles visited the home laboratory of Ed Storms, a retired Los Alamos scientist who is conducting cold fusion experiments in his garage. For Make's website, Charles wrote a wonderful essay about his fascination of extreme science. (Disclaimer: I'm editor-in-chief of Make)
I have an interest in "extreme science," by which I mean research at the edges of plausibility. Of course, there's a lot of self-deception and wishful thinking among researchers who are serious about, say, human cryopreservation or unconventional energy sources. On the other hand, I don't think it's wise to refuse to examine anything that stretches or violates our ideas about the way the universe works. The chance of finding a new Einstein may be as small as the chance of winning the lottery; but if you don't play, you can't win.When MAKE asked me to write a profile, I immediately thought of a man named Ed Storms, a chemist who worked at Los Alamos for several decades before taking early retirement and setting up a garage workshop in which to study low-energy nuclear reactions, or LENR – a generic term for the field that began with so-called "cold fusion." I wondered what Ed was doing now, so I gave him a call.
