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Dewey B. Larson
755 N.E. Royal Court Portland, Oregon 97232 |
Aug. 22, 1985
Dear Jan:
I presume that your telephone conversations during the Board meeting gave you a reasonably good idea as to what was done, but just in case it was not mentioned, I want to say that the Board approved my proposal for a change in advertising strategy, along the lines I described in my letter of July 10.
The results of our test mailings of advertisements for The Universe of Motion have not been satisfactory. They may pick up a little when the colleges get back into business this fall, but even so, it does not look as if the ads will bring in enough orders to pay the cost. So we can’t very well follow up the test mailings with a full-scale campaign on the same basis.
The difficulty seems to be that the package which we are trying to sell has become too big. In earlier days, our theoretical development covered much less ground, and some of it was still rather vague, so far as details were concerned. Those who were able to see the value of a purely deductive system of theory were therefore able to take an interest in our findings without having to face a serious disruption of their established ideas and beliefs. Now that we have extended our coverage into additional areas, and have carried the development into more detail, the conflicts with existing theory are brought out more clearly. It has therefore become more difficult for those who are committed to orthodox ideas to make the break with conventional thought.
Under these circumstances, it seems to me, as I said in my letter of July 10, that it will be advisable to change our approach and hammer away at some specific weak point. I have had this in mind for quite some time, and have been looking for a point where we can attack. The recent change in the astronomers’ interpretation of the galactic recession has provided an opportunity to demonstrate the existence of scalar motion, and since this is a key point in our theoretical development it should give us something to work with.
What we now propose to do is to offer copies of the gravitation article to a selected group of college faculty members. Copies of the letters that we will send out are enclosed, One version goes to new prospects and the other to people who have already received some of our literature. The third of the enclosed letters is to accompany the copies of the article when they are sent out.
I think that the attack on the present-day “motion” concept may also be worth trying in direct contacts such as that which you had with Dr. Gribbin. Of course, we have to sell the whole package sooner or later, but if we can convince some of these people that something has to be changed, they ought to be more willing to listen to ideas as to what that something might be.
