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Dewey B. Larson
755 N.E. Royal Court Portland, Oregon 97232 |
Oct. 17,1983
Dear Jan:
I have been rather slow about acknowledging receipt of various items from you, but I presume you will understand why.
With respect to the proposed statement of publication policy in Reciprocity, I question the advisability of including the last paragraph. This is an internal policy matter that the ordinary contributor should never have occasion to encounter, and it is the kind of thing that it is better to soft pedal. If you say anything at all about it, I would suggest merely a paragraph in your account of the happenings at the convention. I also question whether you are justified in putting this statement in every issue. Many journals carry the explanation of their publication policy only once a year, usually in the January issue. Where space is limited, this ought to be enough.
I had some correspondence with Slaughter, the Arizona author, a few years ago. His main reason for writing to me was to ask advice on how to go about getting his work published. I did not give his work any close scrutiny. As you say, we can't take the time to get acquainted with everyone's ideas. Of course, that can be used as an argument against giving consideration to my ideas too, but the point is that one cannot go in all directions at once. If your have decided that some particular idea, such as my contention that the atom is a combination of motions, is worth an extended consideration, then it does not pay to spend time on a theory based on the existence of atomic “nuclei” until you have come to some conclusion about the motion hypothesis.
Dingle's book is interesting. I have read some of his other works, and I followed some of the controversy in the British journals to which he refers in this book. He is right about the clock paradox. You may recall that I emphasized this point too. His problem, as you say, is that he is unable to come up with an alternative. The trouble with both Einstein's and Dingle's views is that they regard the high speed deviations from the relations that are valid at low speeds as modifications of the motion. My finding is that the motion continues to follow the same relations, and the deviations are in the measurements.
I have read some of the “Ignorance” book, and will dig into it further when I have time. As it happens, I was reading some portions of a book entitled “Mysteries of the Universe” a week or two earlier. The idea of these books is a good one. I would be very much interested in a book that described just what is known about some of the poorly understood physical phenomena, and then discussed the things about those phenomena that are still unknown, and need to be investigated. but the authors evidently cannot admit ignorance. In these books, as well as the others that I have seen, the authors insist on giving the latest hypotheses, and implying that the mysteries have been solved.
I appreciate your calling these matters to my attention.
Sincerely,
