Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Unlearned
    The Unlearned
    The Unlearned
    Ebook57 pages53 minutes

    The Unlearned

    By Raymond Jones

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The scientists of Rykeman III were conceded by all the galactic members to be supreme in scientific achievement. Now the Rykes were going to share their vast knowledge with the scientists of Earth. To any question they would supply an answer—for a price. And Hockley, of all Earth's scientists, was the stubborn one who wanted to weigh the answers with the costs....
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJovian Press
    Release dateApr 6, 2017
    ISBN9781537824161
    The Unlearned
    Author

    Raymond Jones

    Raymond A. Jones teaches in the Department of History at Carleton University. His previous publications include The Nineteenth Century Foreign Office. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the London School of Economics, London University.

    Read more from Raymond Jones

    Related to The Unlearned

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

      Oct 2, 2014

      I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel roo

      11 min read

    • Article

      Our Attitude Toward Aliens Proves We Still Think We’re Special

      Aug 2, 2018

      “How many kingdoms know us not!”—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (1670) One summer’s day in 1950, the great Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch with the physicists Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York at Los Alamos when the c

      7 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jul 14, 2022

      CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS Simon Young’s account of the Wollaton Gnomes [FT417:29] brought to mind an account of “The Fairies of The Burn of Eat

      14 min read

    • Article

      Five Veteran Scientists Tell Us What Most Surprised Them: Fifty years ago, who knew we’d learn to clone genes and find water on Mars?

      Sep 24, 2015

      Turn back the clock to 1965. Science appeared to be marching forward at an unrelenting pace. Biochemists had cracked the genetic code (how DNA translates into proteins), inspiring Life magazine to envision “superbabies with improved minds and bodies.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Dark Matter Is in Our DNA

      Mar 16, 2018

      Dark Matter Is in Our DNA
      6 min read

    • Article

      Storage Space for the Undead: Inside the Cryonics Business

      Dec 28, 2017

      The most secure underground vault in the world sits 650 feet below the earth’s surface in an old salt mine outside the town of Hutchinson, Kansas. Inside: over 35 football fields worth of storage space, encased in a 400-foot-thick salt formation that

      8 min read

    • Article

      A.I. Has Grown Up and Left Home: It matters only that we think, not how we think.

      Jan 22, 2015

      The history of Artificial Intelligence,” said my computer science professor on the first day of class, “is a history of failure.” This harsh judgment summed up 50 years of trying to get computers to think. Sure, they could crunch numbers a billion ti

      9 min read

    • Article

      Lives Of The Great Occultists

      Sep 10, 2020

      Personally, I blame that Aleister Crowley. If my memory serves me well (which, these days, it seldom does), Hunt Emerson and I more or less drifted into creating ‘Lives of the Great Occultists’ after I told him a couple of my favourite yarns about th

      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Contact Paradox’ Sums Up The Search For Extraterrestrials

      Feb 12, 2020

      Keith Cooper traces the history of humanity’s irrepressible urge to search for extraterrestrial intelligence – and the trouble it could get us into.

      2 min read

    • Article

      On The Origin Of Species Had Been Banned?

      Nov 4, 2021

      John is a retired science research leader at the Natural History Museum, London in marine biodiversity, ecology and evolution, and regent’s lecturer at the University of California. His book, The Fall Of Roman Britain And Why We Speak English, will b

      5 min read

    • Article

      Talk About the Passion

      Aug 9, 2023

      Talk About the Passion
      19 min read

    • Article

      The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

      Dec 22, 2023

      As editors our eyes are glued to the page all day, focused on one story, sometimes one tricky passage, and often, when it comes to writing headlines, one word! It’s amazing to look up at the end of the year and see what we’ve produced. We are so happ

      7 min read

    • Article

      Critical Thinker

      Apr 16, 2023

      ANAXIMANDER AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE, by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane, $40) Most scientists know what science is until someone asks them to define it, and then they don’t. It’s something to do with precision and accuracy, so you’d think there was a pre

      3 min read

    • Article

      'Enlightenment Now' Says Human Progress Is Real, Remarkable, And Yet Often Unacknowledged

      Feb 27, 2018

      Steven Pinker marshals data from detailed studies that show the stirring extent of progress human beings have achieved since the 18th century.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Good Vibrations

      Mar 4, 2024

      Good Vibrations
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Muddy Refuge

      Oct 8, 2020

      Lost and Found on the River Thames Lara Maiklem Bloomsbury 2020 Pb, 317pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781408889237 As children, nearly all of us have an instinct for curiosity and collecting. I still have a stone with a hole in it I found on Chesil beach as a thre

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Unlearned

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Unlearned - Raymond Jones

      THE UNLEARNED

      ..................

      Raymond Jones

      JOVIAN PRESS

      Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review or connect with the author.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2017 by Raymond Jones

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      THE UNLEARNED

      THE UNLEARNED

      ..................

      THE CHIEF OFFICER OF SCIENTIFIC Services, Information and Coordination was a somewhat misleading and obscure title, and Dr. Sherman Hockley who held it was not the least of those whom the title misled and sometimes obscured.

      He told himself he was not a mere library administrator, although he was proud of the information files built up under his direction. They contained the essence of accumulated knowledge found to date on Earth and the extraterrestrial planets so far contacted. He didn’t feel justified in claiming to be strictly a research supervisor, either, in spite of duties as top level administrator for all divisions of the National Standardization and Research Laboratories and their subsidiaries in government, industry, and education. During his term of supervision the National Laboratories had made a tremendous growth, in contrast to a previous decline.

      Most of all, however, he disclaimed being a figurehead, to which all the loose strings of a vast and rambling organization could be tied. But sometimes it was quite difficult to know whether or not that was his primary assignment after all. His unrelenting efforts to keep out of the category seemed to be encountering more and more determination to push him in that direction.

      Of course, this was merely the way it looked in his more bitter moments—such as the present. Normally, he had a full awareness of the paramount importance of his position, and was determined to administer it on a scale in keeping with that importance. His decision could affect the research in the world’s major laboratories. Not that he was a dictator by any means, although there were times when dictation was called for. As when a dozen projects needed money and the Congress allotted enough for one or two. Somebody had to make a choice—

      His major difficulty was that active researchers knew it was the Congressional Science Committee which was ultimately responsible for their bread and butter. And the Senators regarded the scientists, who did the actual work in the laboratories, as the only ones who mattered. Both groups tended to look upon Hockley’s office as a sort of fulcrum in their efforts to maintain balance with each other—or as referee in their sparring for adequate control over each other.

      At that, however, things research-wise were better than ever before. More funds and facilities were available. Positions in pure research were more secure.

      And then, once again, rumors about Rykeman III had begun to circulate wildly a few days ago.

      Since Man’s achievement of extra-galactic flight, stories of Rykeman III had tantalized the world and made research scientists sick with longing when they considered the possible truth of what they heard. The planet was rumored to be a world of super-science, whose people had an answer for every research problem a man could conceive. The very few Earthmen who had been to Rykeman III confirmed the rumors. It was a paradise, according to their stories. And among other peoples of the galaxies the inhabitants of Rykeman III were acknowledged supreme in scientific achievement. None challenged them. None even approached them in abilities.

      What made the situation so frustrating to Earthmen was the additional report that the Rykes were quite altruistically sharing their science with a considerable number of other worlds on a fee basis. Earth scientists became intoxicated at the mere thought of studying at the feet of the exalted Rykes.

      Except Dr. Sherman Hockley. From the first he had taken a dim view of the Ryke reports. Considering the accomplishments of the National Laboratories, he could see no reason for his colleagues’ half-shameful disowning of all their own work in favor of a completely unknown culture several hundred million light years away. They were bound to contact more advanced cultures in their explorations—and could be thankful they were as altruistic as

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1