It looks like the state’s most unusual magazine has bitten the dust.
Infinite Energy, a quirky but serious-minded publication about alternative physics that was started in 1994 by Eugene Mallove, a famous supporter of cold fusion, seems to have disappeared. The website is down and the phone number I have for the managing editor, who lived in Allenstown, has been disconnected. The Facebook page of the New Energy Foundation that printed the magazine has been dormant for a decade and I can find nothing else.
This isn’t entirely a surprise. I spoke with the managing editor, Christy Frazier, in 2024 and she wrote that “The magazine/foundation are still operational, but we have had a funding crisis the past few years. Issue 168 is very behind schedule in being released.” Multiple attempts to reach her since then haven’t succeeded so I have to assume that financial reality has reared its ugly head.
That doesn’t mean Infinite Energy won’t be reborn, however. There’s a rabid fanbase for alternative-energy ideas, both serious and outlandish. I could see a bored techbro using a bit of his ill-gotten gains to restart it.
Cold fusion and a murder
The magazine has a fascinating back story because Mallove was a fascinating guy. As a MIT press officer he became convinced of the reality of room-temperature fusion after the famous 1989 release of research by two University of Utah scientists, and later became convinced that MIT and other established physicists were squashing the work to protect their high-temperature fusion work.
He left MIT, wrote a best-seller called “Fire From Ice: Searching for Truth Behind the Cold-Fusion Furor,” created the New Energy Foundation based in New Hampshire and launched Infinite Energy, which was originally called Cold Fusion Magazine. Mallove lived in Bow and I interviewed him several times over the years. His convictions never wavered, even though nothing ever came of cold fusion. (Admittedly, hot fusion isn’t going great guns either.)
Shockingly, Mallove was beaten to death in 2004 at age 56 during a robbery at his Norwich, Conn., childhood home. Two men were arrested soon after but charges were later dropped, which as you might expect generated a ton of conspiracy theories. You can still find true-crime podcasts with titles like “Murdered in Cold Fusion” which think that established science or corporate interests were behind the killing, sometimes because they were opposed to thorium as a nuclear fuel.
A man named Chad Schaffer of Norwich, was later arrested and eventually pled guilty to manslaughter and was imprisoned. According to court records, Mallove had evicted Schaffer’s parents from the house and was cleaning it when Schaffer confronted him. A second man was convicted in 2014 of participating in the killing.
After Mallove’s death, Infinite Energy magazine was taken over by various supporters and published bimonthly and then quarterly.
It was an interesting publication, to say the least. Articles were often long and dense, filled with equations and engineering details, more in tune with Science magazine than Weekly World News. It was very hard to tell what was promising research, what was wishful thinking, and what was borderline quackery. That wasn’t made any easier by the hefty dose of scorn for established institutions that permeated the magazine, not to mention the occasional allegation about this or that promising idea being squashed by the powers that be.
Infinite Energy had a reported press run of about 3,000 for a long time and featured plenty of ads from people selling alternative energy gizmos, people selling books about alternative-energy gizmos, and attorneys ready to help you patent alternative-energy gizmos. But publishing a glossy magazine in print is expensive, and who knows how much those ads actually paid.
So, as I said, it’s not surprising it has succumbed to financial reality; after all, plenty of established magazines have shut down in recent years. And perhaps it will be reborn in digital or analog form.
Stranger things have happened, even if none of them have produced infinite amounts of energy. Yet, anyway.
