In the words of the immortal Yogi Berra, it’s like déjà vu all over again. 16 years after the world was tantalized by the notion of “cold fusion” trumpeted by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the promise of tabletop fusion experiments that might transform the world are once again making headlines.

Dig a little deeper, however, and things do seem to be different this time. When Pons and Fleischmann first made headlines back in 1989, much of the scientific community was antagonized as much by the process as the science. Electing to bypass normal scientific practices and go straight to the media, Pons and Fleischmann announced their discovery with great fanfare in a press conference at the University of Utah, basking in the public spotlight as the scientific revolutionaries who would single-handedly lead the world away from the messy, polluting fossil fuel economy and into the bright sunlight of unlimited clean, safe, accessible and affordable energy. It seemed too good to be true and it was. When other leading scientists failed to reproduce their seemingly miraculous results, the fall was very harsh indeed. “Cold fusion” became synonymous with fakery, scandal and a perversion of the scientific process.

Now, however, key results are being published in major scientific journals and at least some of the relevant authors are taking a much drier and more detached tone. Still, controversy swirls.

The phenomenon in question is known as sonoluminescence – and for enthusiasts, the effect is now known more popularly as “star in a jar”. The idea is to subject high frequency sound waves to certain bubbles of gas in a liquid. The effect of the sound waves exerts tremendous pressure on the bubbles and they implode with a burst of energy in a process known as acoustic cavitation.

Until recently, such experiments were typically performed on water bubbles, but in a recently submitted paper to Nature, Ken Suslick and David Flannigan from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign claim that acoustic cavitation with argon gas in sulphuric acid resulted in collapsing bubbles of roughly 15,000 degrees Celsius, four time hotter than the sun’s surface and reflective of the superhot plasma state of ions and electrons required for fusion.

While steadfast in their claims that they have achieved, however briefly, tiny states of plasma in the collapsing gas bubbles, Suslick and Flannigan are careful not to imply that any actual fusion occurred (there was no evidence of emitted neutrons that are necessary by products of a fusion reaction), but clearly are hopeful that by establishing an efficient way of generating plasma, however briefly, the seeds are sown for future confined fusion reactions that naturally require such a superheated state.

Suslick and Flannigan are considerably more cautious than some of their colleagues, which will doubtless win them considerable accolades from a profession exasperated by trumped-up claims of unverified tabletop fusion reactions and result in their results being treated with the seriousness that they deserve. In a controversial 2002 paper published in Science, a group of scientists led by Rusi Taleyarkhan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee claimed that they had witnessed an actual fusion process triggered by sonoluminescence on acetone.

When recently commenting on the matter, Suslick calmly stated that “Our results can neither confirm nor deny Taleyarkhan’s claims to fusion. Our paper shows for the first time, and definitively, that there can be a plasma formed during this process.”

It must be wonderful to announce to the world that you have solved its energy problems. But it’s even more wonderful to be right. That is, after all, the way to really change the world.