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Dewey B. Larson
755 N.E. Royal Court Portland, Oregon 97232 |
Dec. 5, 1983
Dear Jan:
I have made a change in the manuscript which involves altering a few figures and the explanations that go with them. Please substitute the enclosed pages 278 and 278A for the original page 278. Also make the three changes indicated in the copy of page 279, and the following additional corrections:
Page 280, equation 14-4 Change 2.66 to 2.62
Page 285, line 18 Change this numerical value to 2.1475 x 109
As to your suggestion that completion of Volume II should be given a priority, I intend to concentrate on it as much as the pressure of other matters will permit. I realized, of course, when I decided to complete Volume III ahead of Volume II that there would be some tendency to criticize this sequence on the ground that I am not entitled to use the results of my previous investigations while they are still unpublished. However, I have an answer to this criticism, in that those previous results actually have been published, either in the original edition of the “Structure” or in one or another of my other publications. It appears to me that this is a conclusive answer, so far as the ethics of the situation are concerned. While I may be considered to have an obligation to publish my results before I refer to them in subsequent work, I do not recognize any obligation to make them available in a convenient form. After all, if the previous publications are not very accessible at the present time, that is not something for which I have to take any responsibility. The scientific community has had ample opportunity to acquire my publications. To the extent that they may now be inconvenienced by their failure to do so, the responsibility is theirs, not mine.
I still have a great deal of work to do on Volume II, because the last half of it deals with subjects such as electricity, magnetism, radioactivity, etc., which were not much more than touched in my original publication, and which are rather slow going from an investigative standpoint because my development leads to views of the nature of these phenomena that are quite different from the familiar concepts, and are consequently difficult to handle mentally until one gets used to them.
