Jed,
I can understand why the family would decline to run your obit and think they made the right choice. As well, I am glad to see what you have written and shared publicly. It honors Gene and his search for truth. None of us is without flaws. To reflect the fullness of Gene as you did, is deeply meaningful, and in my opinion, successful.
Thank you,
Steve
At 02:46 PM 5/17/2005, you wrote:
[it has been one year since Gene was murdered. Here is an obituary I wrote for Infinite Energy magazine. The family objected to it, so naturally I acquiesced and withdrew it from publication. After all this time I suppose there is no harm to uploading it here. - Jed]
Eugene Franklin Mallove
To summarize a person's life in a few paragraphs is to caricature him. It is to run the risk that people may remember a few anecdotes instead of the person himself. To summarize a person in a single word is even worse, yet one word -- one quality -- comes to mind when I think of Eugene Mallove. He was indomitable. He was fearless; he was the most determined person I ever met. Again and again, he did what he felt must be done, against enormous odds, often at great personal sacrifice. He resigned from MIT because MIT researchers attacked cold fusion soon after the March 1989 announcement, and because they tried to bury evidence of excess heat in their own experiments. This was an extraordinary thing to do! Call it brave or call it quixotic; very few middle class-people with a comfortable, prestigious job at world-famous institution would resign over a matter of principle, in an obscure scientific debate. But Gene did not hesitate.
I think that in the early years he took it for granted that other scientists would soon come around. They would see the truth, and act upon it, because that is what scientists are supposed to do. He believed that scientists are, by and large, as intellectually honest as he was himself, and that they love truth, and are above petty politics. After years of disappointment he became cynical about them. He came to believe that institutions such as MIT, the DoE and American Physics Society are hopelessly corrupt, and beyond redemption. Since he himself was a product of the establishment, with degrees from MIT and Harvard, this must have been hard for him. Those of us who never fully trusted the establishment in the first place, and who were never part of it, were not as disillusioned.
Nobody is perfect. Every strength of personality can also be a weakness. Gene's adamant self-assurance sometimes manifested itself as over-confidence. He was annoying at times, even to his friends. Especially to his friends. He was too quick to lend support to controversial, unproven, unreplicated experiments and theories. He published these ideas, which was unquestionably the right thing to do, but he also endorsed them, and spent money on them unwisely. He wasted time, he wasted funding, and he hurt his own reputation. He was so enthusiastic, and so anxious to see positive results, he would sometimes jump to conclusions and announce a positive result in one issue of the magazine, only to be forced to retract in the next issue. He took sides in heated arguments between "free energy" factions, where as a publisher he should have remained neutral. This is not the right mindset for a publisher. It is not a productive, objective attitude for an experimentalist.
Gene went from believing the textbooks, and championing mainstream science, to the opposite extreme. He sometimes seemed convinced that anything the establishment endorsed was wrong, including Einstein's theories and perhaps even the laws of thermodynamics. He concluded that people who oppose the establishment are probably right. That does not follow. A more evenhanded, or cynical, person is skeptical about both sides. Einstein may be wrong, but there is no reason to think his critics are right. Throughout history, people on both sides of scientific controversies have often been wrong. Light is neither particle nor wave. The distinction turned out to be unhelpful to our understanding of light.
But I should not exaggerate this quality. If cold fusion survives, Gene's masterpiece, "Fire from Ice," will be judged one of the fairest, most objective, prescient books ever published.
Faith in action and the will to commit are defects in an experimentalist, but they are virtues in a crusading social reformer, and that is what Gene became, in spite of himself. At times I sensed he was conflicted over this, since he considered himself a Republican or a libertarian. But his parents named him after Franklin D. Roosevelt, and I think a person can never turn away from the heritage of liberal activism such parents bequeath. If cold fusion succeeds, Gene will be counted as a great social activist. When he was discouraged, he would express the nihilistic conservative view that mankind is a lost cause, and hardly worth fighting for anyway. I did not take him seriously. No one could give so much of himself, so unstintingly, without faith in people and love for mankind.
Gene often became angry. As he told Steve Krivit, what he wanted most was vindication. That would be Old Testament vindication, not a New Age happy ending. But in his personal life, he did not let this anger cloud his friendships, or interfere with his sense of humor, his zest for life, his creativity, curiosity, and fascination with the new. He was always buoyant, always looking forward to the next experiment. He and I often argued. We disagreed about the direction of the magazine. I ran out of things to write about cold fusion, and I have devoted most of my time for the last few years to the LENR-CANR web site instead. Gene and I seldom talked during this time. Yet whenever we did, despite our differences, I always came away with a buzz of excitement, a sense of exuberance. I felt motivated, and anxious to press on.
I think he remained convinced to the end that we must win, and we will win, despite what seemed to me to be overwhelming opposition and very bad odds. I am in this fight because I can be. Because it appeals to me, and I can do as I please in life. Gene was in this fight because he had to be. It was his karma. He threw himself into it in a way that made me and other advocates look like dilettantes. Without a trace of embarrassment, he would juggle menial jobs, working all hours to support his family, while he would be plotting, striving, struggling, negotiating, and driving on with boundless energy to promote cold fusion and the magazine. He would work all day, and then speak eloquently on a radio program half the night. His ability to motivate other people, his book, articles and lectures had enormous and still-untold influence. He believed in the power of truth. In the cover pages of "Fire from Ice," he quoted Alexander Dumas: "Great is truth. Fire cannot burn, nor water drown it." As a cynic and student of history I say: "yet people can ignore the truth, and they often do." I still doubt that we shall prevail, and I know it will be more difficult without Gene's help.
