From: potter@csusac.ecs.csus.edu (Carl Kolchak)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Heydt Mail..(Was CHILDREN OF THE ATOM--thanks to all who answered)
Summary: re-comments
Keywords: Just don't mention Ruth De La Warre.
Date: 10 Apr 92 01:55:48 GMT
Article-I.D.: csusac.1992Apr10.015548.27688
Followup-To: /dev/null
Distribution: usa
Organization: INS, Inc.

Dorothy Heydt commented:

> From: cozzlab@garnet.berkeley.edu
> Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
> Subject: Re: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM--thanks to all who answered
> Message-ID: <s1s75INN1g7@agate.berkeley.edu>
> Date: 9 Apr 92 16:43:17 GMT
> References: <1992Apr8.023510.9386@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
>             <s07reINNpct@agate.berkeley.edu>
> Organization: University of California, Berkeley
> 
> Her name was Wilma, with no R.  An accepted female name,  There was a girl
> named Wilma at my elementary school and another at my high school (neither
> of them wrote anything, though...)  I met the lady once, as I mentioned
> a few postings back, and she said, "Hello, I'm Wilma Shiras, only the book
> said 'Wilmar'..." and about that point the name "Shiras" hit my cerebral
> cortex and I froze into Fan Position #1*.  When I came out of it she
> introduced her husband and showed me pictures of her kids and grandkids.
> A very nice lady, now gone to her reward.

   Sorry to hear that part;  "IN HIDING"'s always been one of my very 
   favorite pieces.   At least a lot of fen made sure she knew she was
   appreciated.

 Your comments on John Campbell's foolishness:
   (And I notice you don't list the ones he nailed, like the assertion
    that lithium would make a better base for fusion bombs than tritium,
    or his contributions to two-color human vision analysis, or his 
    exploration of human color-gradation sensitivity, or his 
    prediction of the best places to search for antibiotics, etc, 
    und so weiter...)

>   Dianetics.

    He published *one* article on "Dianetics" in 1950.  His view was that 
    Hubbard had discovered a valid therapeutic technique, and couldn't 
    get a fair hearing (probably because he was easily identifiable!)
       That was the only article on the subject ASTOUNDING ever printed,
    and story references to "Dianetics" and "Scientology" and "clearing"
    evaporated in fairly short order.  The only one I remember offhand
    was in an Alan E. Nourse story, and sure wasn't in the text after
    Nourse published it in novel form; the *concept* was still there,
    but no longer expressed in "Dianetic" terms.

>   "Magic is really psi."

    There's something wrong with this?   *IF* psi exists, usage would 
    constitute an explorable technology subject to analysis and training;
    *provided* we can discover the rules.   Even James P. Hogan once told
    me, "I don't insist that psi doesn't exist!   Just that you need a 
    very *good* experiment to prove its existence, a very well-designed
    experiment!" (Westercon, '86)
    Campbell's approach was always trying to find experimental verification,
    something "communicable to other practitioners in the field."

>   The Hieronymus Machine.

    *Shrug*   It got a patent, didn't it?   Remember, Campbell also published
    all of those "Leonard Lockhard" stories (Ted Thomas's pseudonym) about 
    how ridiculous U.S. Patent Law is.   This comes more under the heading of
    "It looks like there may be something there.  Let's poke it with a stick
     for a while and see if it's real."  (Answer:  Who knows?  No one's 
    designed a really solid experiment to test this one yet.)

>   "Slaves are better off than free men."

     This essay grew out of the discussion that led to H. Beam Piper's story,
     "A SLAVE IS A SLAVE."  (I think you can find it in the collection,
     "EMPIRE.")   Contained in this dicussion were also the points that, 
     from an objective viewpoint, sending children to school counts as 
     slavery, because they're being force to perform work they do not wish
     to do, for no pay, work; and that, since U.S. citizens have no 
     effective voice in governmental decisions, or tax payments, we are 
     all in thrall to the U.S. Government.   He got some great arguments 
     going over this one; Mike Stemple, an Air Force pilot, challenged him
     to prove that Stemple wasn't a free man.   It took JWC about ten 
     minutes, using Socratic questions, to walk Stemple back into a corner
     and get him to admit he'd sold himself into slavery when he took his
     officer's oath..... Stemple laughed, but admitted JWC had a point.
       (The point was that all men are enslaved by their commitments; and
     that, since all men have something more important to them than their 
     lives, they are effectively enslaved by any circumstance or person 
     which holds that something hostage.)

>   The Dean Drive.

     Ah, one of the most fun ones.   This comes under the "There might be 
     something there; how are we going to know if we don't poke it with a 
     stick for a while, etc.." heading.
     For those who are in their twenties, a brief explanation:  Dean built
     devices which could apparently reduce their weight while sitting on 
     spring scales, or move across smooth floors... by converting rotary 
     motion to linear motion without a substrate to react against.
     Dr. William O. Davis wrote an article called "THE FOURTH LAW OF MOTION,"
     which sought to show that the second derivative of motion, the rate of
     change of the rate of change, was ignored in Newtonian physics.   
     This whole mess got a lot of folks started doing garage experiments,
     and while no one came up with a spaceship drive, two kids in Kearny, 
     Nebraska, did come up with a new design for a cheaply-manufacturable
     bearing race, the patent on which paid for their college educations.
     A lot of these suckers got built, and not a one of them passed the 
     "zero-substrate" test.  (Hanging from a string, with the axis of 
     acceleration horizontal, does it move to the side?   Answer: NO.)
     But in the process, the readers of ASTOUNDING/ANALOG were forced 
     to re-examine basic tenets of one of their major religions, Physics,
     and come up with tests to validate (or invalidate) their opinions. 
     Throughout the whole mess, Campbell never said "This thing's a space-
     ship drive."   What he DID say was, "We've got this funny thing, and 
     we can't get any big labs or government scientists to poke it with a 
     stick and see if there's anything real there."   He milked it for a 
     lot of really great arguments before all the evidence was in.
       This is a bad thing?   It's FUN to screw around with crockbrained
     ideas; and it sure beat the hell out of screwing around with LSD, 
     which was what most of my college chums were doing at the time.  
     I'm alive, healthy, marginally sane, and I learned something.  Many
     of them are dead, nutso, or worse, alive and unaware.  Thank you, JWC.

>   "Northern Europeans are smarter than anyone on Earth,
>   and by expansion, Earthmen are smarter than anybody in the Galaxy."

     Haw.  Remember the editorial on Campbell's belief that there might be
     different racial *aptitudes?*
     One of the things he pointed out was that, given high metallurgical 
     technology, calculus, and lots of raw materials, the best musical 
     instrument invention his ancestors had been able to come up with 
     was adding a third drone to the bagpipes imported by the Romans 
     two thousand years ago.   He then discussed the absolute glory of 
     hearing Beethoven performed by a Trinidad steel-drum band, using 
     instruments made out of scrap drums washed up on a beach......
 
     He never said "Europeans are smarter."   He said, "Maybe there are 
     differences, and we ought to try to design experiments to find out."
     He said the same things with reference to sexual differences, and 
     even touched on the old Whorfian hypothesis that one's language 
     affects one's ability to reason and invent.
 
     Of course, far be it from me to point out that recent evidence shows
     a larger average cross-section in the corpus callosum of a female 
     human brain than in the average male human brain, with consequent
     increased inter-hemispheric bandwidth, resulting in greater average
     language ability, particularly in later life, due to greater 
     hemispheric integration.
       Since the work on this was done at U.C. Berserkeley, it
     might even be something Ms. Heydt has heard of.

> John Campbell was a Truly Great Mind, but don't try to tell me he
> wasn't capable of Truly Great Foolishness when he felt like it.

     He wasn't.  He was capable of Utterly Magnificent Foolishness, and 
     don't you ever forget it!

     .... because *HE* never forgot that Looking Stupid As Hell is quite
     often the only way you can stumble over something new and interesting.

     He was willing to embarrass the hell out of himself in front of a 
     quarter of a million readers every month, just to get them thinking,
     and hopefully *enjoying* it.   Fortunately, he also enjoyed being 
     mule-headed, close-minded, and prejudiced, because that made people
     livid enough to find better ways to get the point across.
     .....THEN he bought their article!
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