Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1611

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Fred Singer, Physics Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

March 31, 1957

 

Dear Dr. Singer:

 

     It surely was nice getting acquainted with you all over again. It was wonderful to find how you had gone ahead from college days and had so much wonderful experience here and abroad and got so well circumstanced in your happily chosen profession.

 

     In addition to all this, you were a wonderfully attentive listener to ideas that to many less open and adventurous minds would have seemed entirely out of place to a specialist in physical science. There is a widely acknowledged need of intense specialists who are also versatile enough to move into other areas, like Schroedinger into biology and Sinnott into psychology — and God knows who, maybe Singer, into sociology, or whatever it may be called when it evolves into a quantitative science and thereby develops a tech­nology comparable to that springing out of the other quantitative sciences. My own considerable efforts in this direction will soon be crystallized in a volume which I look forward to presenting to you with my compliments within the next few weeks.

 

     Meantime, I am reminded of your particular interest in ancient alphabets, especially the Korean and the indications of its Hebrew origin that you have turned up. You remember that I mentioned Sequoyah, the Cherokee Indian who is supposed to have devised an alphabet all on his own. My most excellent friend, Dr. F. A. Harper, of the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York (former Professor of Marketing at Cornell), who has been visiting me lately here at my own little Foundation, has an article entitled, “Sequoya, Symbol of Free Men.” I am sending you a copy of this, which I think is interesting in itself and may be of even more special interest to you for its reference to Sequoyah both in the text and in the bibliography.

 

     Again, it was delightful to visit with you. Both of us, my grandson, Spencer MacCallum, and I enjoyed it very much and look forward to seeing you again not too long away.

 

                        Sincerely,

 

 

SH/m

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