Jed Rothwell writes, > Sez who? Where will this headline be?
I hope that I am not misinformed on this, but since you have not heard, perhaps it is premature to speculate. I still suspect that an article will appear soon in "Fusion Science & Technology" - the renamed journal of The American Nuclear Society. Since Miley retired and was replaced by Uckan as editor the articles relating to LENR have all but disappeared, but perhaps things are poised to change with higher quality experiments which do not depend on calorimetry. They need something to broaden their ever-narrowing appeal and justify that ~$1500 subscription price for 8 issues. > Letts and Cravens are nice guys, but they have not revealed many details or done > anything to encourage replication or outside interest. Getting information from > them is like pulling teeth. I think this applies to Cravens. He has been surprisingly reticent in the past about information which he had freely given to IE which they never got around to publishing, for instance. If all researchers were that paranoid about sharing results, the field would go nowhere; but the fact that the ICCF-10 paper in question was full of details, and that a normally skeptical Scott Little participated in the findings, and that similar techniques have been used before with lesser success, for the reasons stated in the paper, makes it appear that things have improved dramatically. > As I recall, Ed Storms replicated this and was duly impressed, but not all > that impressed. That is a surprise for the reason which will be mentioned below. > I think it has been known for some time that things like > laser light or a heat pulse will reliably trigger a reaction in a cathode > that is otherwise ready to go. I do not know whether a laser is > significantly better than the heat pulse, If you read the experiment carefully, and understand that it is not just a laser, but a laser tuned to an exact frequency which coincides with a *quantum state,* and saw the part about the adverse effects of polarization, then it is clear that yes, the laser light is absolutely critical for this experiment, heat will not work, and moreover that the effect is a robust QM effect. That last point should be stressed. But the main thing which seems to have been missed here is what is NOT said in this particular experiment, but should be demonstrated soon, hopefully. This will be experimental work from another source than Letts and Cravens, or perhaps from both. The importance is this, as what I am inferring is that for the first time, overunity output of LENR will be in the form of direct ELECTRICAL output, rather than heat. How is that possible? Letts and Cravens, of course, ran their experiment in a water filled cell where heat output was the only option, but since ongoing electrolysis is not necessary with a version of the laser technique, at least not for a substantial time period, then a similar experiment can be run in vacuum with direct conversion of the energy of the charged particles into electricity, rather than into heat. IOW, once the target electrode has been fabricated, loaded and sealed, then it can be placed in a direct converter scheme, like a smaller version of this one: http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/LEC27/IMAGES/fig7.JPG Which, once irradiated with a laser(s) of precise frequency will stimulate BEC-like fusion and allow the energy of charged particles to be converted directly into electricity at 60-80% efficiency. That is a pretty huge jump over heat output ! This kind of thing will eliminate all the vagueness inherent in calorimetry, even if the initial experiment is not self-powered. By that, it is meant that if you direct converter shows an electrical output of 500 milliwatts from a laser beam of 50 milliwatts, then those results stand by themselves without all the questions which can come up when calorimetry is used. Even J.R. seems to question the calorimetry of the Letts paper, so you can imagine what a Park or other skeptic would say about it. With direct electrical conversion, these kinds of doubts are no longer tenable. Perhaps this shameless optimism is a result of overestimating the impact that a successful direct-electrical-conversion experiment would have on the broader physics community, perhaps not. Time will tell. Jones
