Dead or alive, some of the key members of the Fraternal Order of Fusion (FOF) at the end of the 1980s are in alphabetical order (list taken from Robin Herman, Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy, Cambridge University Press, 1990), Artsimovich, Lev; Bickerton, Roy; Bussard, Robert; Clarke, John; Cockroft, John; Coensgen, Fred; Coppi, Bruno; Efthimion, Phil; Eubank, Harold; Fermi, Enrico; Fowler, Ken; Furth, Harold; Goldston, Rob; Gottlieb, Mel; Grove, Don; Guccione, Bob; Hirsch, Robert; Iso, Yasuhiko; Kurchatov, Igor; Lidsky, Lawrence; Meade, Dale; Muchovatov, Vladimir; Pease, Sebastian; Post, Dick; Rebut, Paul-Henri; Robinson, Derek; Rosenbluth, Marshall; Sakharov, Andrei; Spitzer, Lyman; Stodiek, Wolfgang; Storm, Erik; Strauss, Lewis; Tait, Graeme; Tamm, Igor; Teller, Edward; Thomson, George Paget; Thonemann, Peter; Velikov, Yevgeny; Ware, Alan; Wuster, Hans-Otto; Yoshikawa, Masaji; Yoshikawa, Shoichi. Not surprisingly, three more names are not listed here because they were considered perpetrators of fusion hoaxes. The first is the dictator Juan Peron of Argentina who in 1951 claimed his country had built a working thermonuclear fusion reactor. The second and the third are B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann at the University of Utah who in the spring of 1989 claimed the experimental success of cold fusion.

Surprisingly, theoretical physicists like Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, Dirac, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, Glashow, and Hooft are not mentioned. More surprisingly is the fact that their theoretical works definitely bear physical clues to the eventual success of fusion. Although another successful contemporary of Feynman named Schwinger was interested in fusion research, his works on cold fusion were mostly ignored by other theoretical physicists. In hindsight, since fusion remains a dream for the future after years of intense international researches but without much theoretical supports, the acronym FOF could really stand for Fraternal Order of Failure. This is a failure to understand completely the physics of plasma’s self-interaction dynamics. One alternative is to study plasma as the 4th state of matter using a quantum theory of the space-time continuum as the infinite sum of infinitesimal squares of energy derived from thermal primary forces at the order of Planck length.