blication was renewed. |
| |
| Other Transcriber Notes and Errata are given at the end of |
| the text. |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

To all profound thinkers in the realms of Science who may chance to read
SKYLARK THREE, greetings:

I have taken certain liberties with several more or less commonly
accepted theories, but I assure you that those theories have not been
violated altogether in ignorance. Some of them I myself believe sound,
others I consider unsound, still others are out of my line, so that I am
not well enough informed upon their basic mathematical foundations to
have come to any definite conclusion, one way or the other. Whether or
not I consider any theory sound, I did not hesitate to disregard it, if
its literal application would have interfered with the logical
development of the story. In "The Skylark of Space" Mrs. Garby and I
decided, after some discussion, to allow two mathematical
impossibilities to stand. One of these immediately became the target of
critics from Maine to California and, while no astronomer has as yet
called attention to the other, I would not be surprised to hear about
it, even at this late date.

While I do not wish it understood that I regard any of the major
features of this story as likely to become facts in the near
future--indeed, it has been my aim to portray the highly improbable--it
is my belief that there is no mathematical or scientific impossibility
to be found in "Skylark Three."

In fact, even though I have repeatedly violated theories in which I
myself believe, I have in every case taken great pains to make certain
that the most rigid mathematical analysis of which I am capable has
failed to show that I have violated any known and proven scientific
fact. By "fact" I do not mean the kind of reasoning, based upon
assumptions later shown to be fallacious, by which it was "proved" that
the transatlantic cable and the airplane were scientifically impossible.
I refer to definitely known phenomena which no possible future
development can change--I refer to mathematical proofs whose fundamental
equations and operations involve no assumptions and contain no
second-degree uncertainties.

Please bear in mind that we KNOW very little. It has been widely