Constance Caraway P.I. ~ Episode 73

Chapter Seven

AUTHORSHIP

Nearly every literary work has a creator, the one individual who is responsible for it, an ascribed acknowledged credit. Most of us, writer or reader, have an erudite bent, an area of interest that we are attracted to for whatever reason, be it passion or curiosity.

Authorship can be applied to:

A book
A philosophy
An idea

If you copy text from a book and claim it as your own without acknowledging the author, it is called plagiarism.

Now you can be defiant and assign authorship to nothing or no one, but by merely claiming so does not make it so.

So, if this wonderful world on which we live was created for our pleasure, would it not be wise to at least give credit where credit is due?

The University of Chicago serves as a magnet for a wide variety of academic pursuits. Its centralized location in North America makes it the perfect place for like-minded individuals to congregate.

As an example, when it came to developing a war-busting-atomic-bomb, Chicago became to logical choice to do so; not so good for testing it safely, but a swell place for a think tank to flourish.

Willard Libby was not on The Pile Team at Argonne National Lab, but he did play a role in taking it to completion with the greater Manhattan Project. It allowed him to establish a platform from which he could work on other things, like radiocarbon dating.

His office in a remote wing of the Humanities Building at U-Chicago is well “lived in”, a home away from home if you will. If you want to steal something of value from his home in Olympia Fields, you might net yourself a color television or a short-wave radio. However, if you want to make off with something of value from his office home, you would need to find it first. He called it ‘the best kept secret’ around and is proud of it.