The Psychedelic Tourist
1.12.2004
-from the foreword to Current Topics in Radiation Research, Vol. V,
ed. by Michael Ebert & Alma Howard.
Published in 1969 by North-Holland Publishing Company
Foreword
There has been an enormous increase in the volume of published scientific information during the past two decades, and the tide is still rising. New techniques of listing, coding, classifying, abstracting and distributing information have been developed, and have improved efficiency in making the printed word available to research workers. But no substitute has been found for the processes which go on within an interested, informed and intelligent mind - processes of selection, digestion, organization and synthesis. It is the aim of this series of books to make available to our readers the fruits of those processes, in the belief that the pictures transmitted in this way are sharper and clearer than any mechanical collage, however complete. For this reason we choose authors who can speak with authority, and we ask them to give a personal view of their subject, and to build it up from what seems to them to be relevant and interesting, without the obligation of an attempt at comprehensiveness.
The success of the series is due to the high quality of our authors and their articles, for which we are most grateful: but also, we believe, to this absence of constraint.
The Editors
I think this foreword could apply to any thinking, contemplating person on the planet. Speak with authority about your interests from a personal view, using what evidence you think is relevant and interesting, without an obligation at comprehensiveness. Don't we all do this with respect to that which interests us? Its not specific to any learned person, but to anyone who takes the time to contemplate their own interests.
What was true in 1969 still applies today. Information can be listed, classified, and distributed, but until it enters the mind of an individual it does little. Information must be selected, digested, organized, and synthesized; that is assimilated by the individual. Information that has not been taken in is nothing more than random letters and numbers on a page. Again, as with art, information can exist only between, at a minimum, the creator and a receptive individual. Information and art exist not in a vacuum but in a relationship between people. There is the created intent and the assimilated idea; which are not necessarily the same thing. Communication and its fundamental issue, how to properly convey the intended purpose?
