SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

415 MADISON AVENUE,

NEW YORK, N. Y. 10017 (212) 754-0550

26 May 1981

Dear Mr. Snelson:

While it is difficult to overrate the act of the imagination in the advance of human understanding, the strategy of the discipline of objective knowledge is to confront the (imaginative) hypothesis with a reproducible experiment. The formal agreement is that we accept as datum that and only that which we get in the cross hairs of our instruments.

This is a remarkably successful strategy. As proof of the "reality it reaches," it is the experiment -- scaled up to industrial dimensions -- that becomes the technology.

It may be that some other civilization in some other galaxy has a better strategy, but we have yet to get one in the cross hairs. We must work with what we have got.

Your problem is that your models do not capture the fancy of the people who work with quantum electrodynamics. This is the most nearly perfect body of theory ever developed, and it has placed man in command of much of nature at that scale. If their "politics" is against you, they stand on pretty secure ground.

I spent the morning when Reagan was inaugurated in the Hirschhorn sculpture garden admiring your Needle Tower.

Warmest regards,

(signed)Gerard Piel

Publisher

GP: rc

Mr. Kenneth Snelson

140 Sullivan Street

New York, New York 10012