In March 1989, five days after Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference announcing their findings of cold fusion at the University of Utah, Pons' Internet (NSFNET) email address was posted to sci.physics.
Here's Dr. Pons's e-address:
pons@chemistry.utah.edu
You can try to finger it first.
Gary Taubes writes in Bad Science: The Short Life and Wierd Times of Cold Fusion that
Two physicists, who requested to remain anonymous, did try to "finger" Pons's mail account.
(I presume the author implies the meaning of the word "finger" as in "to pilfer", and while this is not what the finger command does, it would seem sensible to finger an account prior to breakin to ensure that the target user is not currently logged in.)
To assure that they wouldn't be traced, they used the account of another physicist who rarely used his computer...Pons's account was guarded by a password of his choosing. The two physicists tried "cfusion," which didn't work, then remembered that Pons had said he was a homebody, so they tried the names of several family members and hit eventually and correctly on Sheila, the name of his wife. So they broke into his computer account and spent two hours reading his mail... They justified the breaking and entering by the importance of the controversy and the inability to get a straight story out of Utah [Emphasis added]...[One of the two anonymous physicists] added that he knew of at least two other scientsts who did the same, one from Oak Ridge and one from Caltech. In any case, Pons later changed his password.
Copyright 1999-2009 Mark Wahl. All rights reserved.