Ed, Thanks for your more detailed answer, which addresses several points of interest in the Letts effect which were unclear from you published experiment, and your previous messages. Perhaps we should even reserve judgement on this name, the Letts effect, pending review of the similar work of Dr. Mitchell Swartz, who seems to claiming some priority in this discovery. More disturbingly, he seems to be insinuating that there is an ongoing effort on the part of LENR-CANR to censor or otherwise obstruct the distribution of his information.
But back to the task of looking towards the future of a planet which is desperately in need of a prompt solution to its increasing energy needs, part of which might be met if the [eponymic] effect is truly reproducible, with or without the direct conversion of heat into electricity... I think everyone will agree with your first conclusion: "In short, many of the details about the effect still need to be determined." However, in regard to the second, "Therefore, it is premature to speculate about a model." Experimenters desirous of efficiency should disagree in the strongest terms with that conclusion for several reasons: 1) The important thing for the future, not only of this experiment but perhaps for the entire field, is to find the correct model expediently, in order to guide in the correct understanding of this anomaly; and this cannot be done efficiently without first designing experiments based on *most likely possible models,* so that the false models can be eliminated, one by one. 2) To proceed in a hit-or-miss fashion, based on incremental improvements of past experiments, might provide some good answers also, but unless one is very fortunate or skilled, it will logically be a semi-blind effort, since there is no satisfactory underlying model. No doubt you have a personal model in the formative stages, which steers the design of ongoing work. But even though this Edisonian approach does work well sometimes, the only problem is, it may not be as efficient for others than yourself as the alternative: which is building speculative models first, and then performing experiments to prove/disprove those. 3) There are some easy-to-disprove new models, based on Quantum Mechanics, which can be put forward. 4) At least one of these models is poised to produce answers for less effort than is involved in the typical calorimetry experiment, because calorimetry is not needed-and in fact, in this model retention of excess heat in the active zone could be inhibitory to the effect. This model will depend on a newfound ability (hopefully), if the obvious extension to the Letts effect is correct, to construct the experiment in two separated steps a) loading and sealing a target, b) irradiating a stand-alone target, not with some randomly chosen frequency but with a frequency determined by the model, and irradiation the target outside of a liquid cell, so that charged particles can be collected, if they are present. If charged particles are not found, and they should be easy to find if they are present, then that would be very temporarily disappointing, but might lead to a more refined model and subsequent experiment to prove/disprove the next model. You are understandably committed to the Edisonian approach - fine - it has worked for you in the past, but that is because you are an exceptionally skilled experimenter, like Thomas A. himself - but the rarity of those traits only reinforces the notion that it is wiser for others to proceed more logically. I just wish you and the others in this field has a staff of 50-60 technicians to push this effort along Regards, Jones Beene Here is a story on the Large Hadron Collider http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3583658.stm which is the latest $5 billion boondoggle which takes away even more potential funding from much higher priority needs - like REAL - solutions to nuclear energy at the low-energy end of the spectrum. Give experimenter like Storms/Letts/Shoulders/Miley/ etc. etc. a small fraction of that and we could already be sitting on the answer to an oil-free future.
