Name Dewey Larson | Role Author | |
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Died May 25, 1990, Portland, Oregon, United States Books The Universe of Motion, Nothing But Motion | ||
Dewey Bernard Larson (November 1, 1898; McCanna, North Dakota – May 25, 1990; Portland, Oregon) was an American engineer and the author of numerous books in the realm of physics, astrophysics and economic science.
Contents
Education
Larson graduated from Oregon State University in the class of 1922 along with his classmate and lifelong acquaintance Linus Pauling and with a major in Mining Engineering. As Chief Engineer for a utility company in Portland, Larson was heavily involved with research activity for its chemical products. In the meantime, influenced by the Australian-born philosopher Samuel Alexander and others, he pursued theoretical physics research on his own, seeking a means to calculate the inter-atomic distances of solid state elements from first principles.
Theoretical Work
In the physical sciences Larson developed what he termed the Reciprocal System of Theory, based on two fundamental postulates on the nature of space and time, claiming to derive the existence of matter, radiation, electricity, magnetism, gravitation etc. directly from the mentioned postulates, which are:
In his books on economics Larson developed what he deemed to be a general theory of economics based on the scientific method. The main thesis of The Road to Full Employment is that unemployment is independent on the size of the labor force, but determined by the value of labor being at least equal to its total cost. In The Road to Permanent Prosperity the author formulates a number of fundamental principles, the first three of which are:
Reception
Larson’s work has not received general acceptance by the scientific community. Amongst academics, his work was championed and further developed by Dr. K.V.K. Nehru of the Department of Engineering at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad, India, along with Dr Vijay Kumar of the Department of Physics at the same institution, as well as by individual researchers, such as Dr. Ronald Satz and Lawrence Denslow. A recent work in the theory is by Satz, The Reciprocal System: Microcosmos Database, 2014, the world's first computational theoretical database for the properties of matter. In 2017 Satz published a new software eBook Existents and Interactions: A Computational Treatise of the Reciprocal System--The True Theory of Everything. This consists of two files: a PDF file containing 1711 pages and a PPT files containing 1711 slides; thousands of equations and numerous graphs are included in this work.
A scientific society devoted to the publication of scientific papers on the Reciprocal System was set up in 1971, published a quarterly journal and held annual conferences until the late 1990s.