Vanity

We’re still going through his boxes of papers and tools and memorabilia. I found his notes for his first book, which was never completed. It is just as well--Blame it on Venus would have been a Velikovskian tract. I read over his page complaining about the foolishness of astronomers who claimed to have seen silicate dust around one star. I could have taken him to the physics museum and showed him emission spectra and explained absorption spectra, and I think he’d have gotten the picture—he used to look at electron scattering spectra to identify minerals. Never happened, though.

He praised Velikovsky a time or two to me, and I complained about orbital dynamics. I guess he decided I was one of the lock-step establishment and didn't want to waste time arguing.

As I filed the papers in a box, I wondered if my own efforts were just as ridiculous. I devised a preon model that didn’t work, though the symmetries were unexpected. A BFI approach to studying those symmetries ran aground on tensor transformations that I couldn’t solve. I played around with generalized lines in metric space—which is probably a special case of a much more general approach that I don’t know anything about. I tried to get limits on dark matter interactions with neutrinos, and they’re terribly loose—work from a half dozen other groups is orders of magnitude better. No breakthroughs here.

Oh well. Do what is in front of me faithfully...

He didn’t finish his second book either, but I think we can make it happen anyway.