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3 pages. Horizontal crease. Very Good. Quoting from Wikipedia: "On September 16, 1952, Pauling opened a new research notebook with the words 'I have decided to attack the problem of the structure of nuclei.' On October 15, 1965, Pauling published his Close-Packed Spheron Model of the atomic nucleus in two well respected journals, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For nearly three decades, until his death in 1994, Pauling published numerous papers on his spheron cluster model. . . . In an interview given in 1990 Pauling commented on his model: 'Now recently, I have been trying to determine detailed structures of atomic nuclei by analyzing the ground state and excited state vibrational bends, as observed experimentally. From reading the physics literature, Physical Review Letters and other journals, I know that many physicists are interested in atomic nuclei, but none of them, so far as I have been able to discover, has been attacking the problem in the same way that I attack it. So I just move along at my own speed, making calculations, and I don't worry about someone else publishing their results a month before I publish mine'." Jeremy Bernstein had written a piece for the New York Times (April 28, 1982) entitled "Accepting Scientific Ideas". Linus Pauling begins this letter to Jeremy Bernstein by saying he read Bernstein's piece "with much interest". Bernstein had written: "there should be some support, I think, for people with solid scientific credentials who, for their own reasons, refuse to swim in the same stream as the rest of us. This raises the very important question of how a scientist can tell an unconventional idea from a crank idea. I say 'scientist' because I do not think a nonscientist can make this judgment at all. In fact, I do not think that most scientists can do it in fields that are far removed from their own. . . . In my own field, the physics of elementary particles, I have occasion to encounter papers by people I have not heard of and that, at first sight, seem a little crazy but that, upon closer examination, turn out to be quite interesting. When I receive such a paper, I ask myself three questions: 1. Does it explain anything? 2. Does it predict anything? 3. Is it connected to anything?" By 1982, Pauling's "polyspheron theory of nuclear structure" had been before the scientific world for 17 years, but it had made no impact at all. In this letter, Pauling answers Bernstein's three questions in the affirmative for the polyspheron theory of nuclear structure. Then Pauling writes in his letter: "during the 17 years after the publication of my first paper there has not, so far as I know, appeared a single reference to any of my papers in papers written by other physicists and published in Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, or other physics journals. . . . I am not very concerned about the failure of nuclear physicists to be interested in what I have written, but I must say that I do feel that nuclear physics would benefit if the physicists were to attempt to understand nuclei in the way that I have done.". Seller Inventory # 16821
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