"We thought about it, but it was too difficult to put into practice." Dewitt explained, "It's hard for a mentally ill person to record his thoughts clearly and coherently, like writing a thesis. His manuscripts were chaotic, almost like strings of gibberish. Only someone who truly understood what he was writing would be sensitive to their contents, including the people who plagiarized him. Even they only understood a small part of the key points."
"What would that be like? Say you were given a long string of letters, all the other letters arranged randomly, with the spelling of your name mixed in somewhere among them. You could only understand the spelling of your name in the middle; the rest would be incomprehensible."
Song He let out an enlightened "Oh," imagining boxes filled with disorderly manuscripts, the handwriting as messy as draft paper, the content disjointed and incoherent, and the train of thought unbelievably erratic.
Interpreting this sort of writing must feel a lot like deciphering Oracle Bone Script. You knew the contents were rich, but your level of knowledge limited how much you could understand.
"Teacher Lambert spent the final thirty years of his life closely following papers published in every field of mathematics and comparing them with Quincy's posthumous manuscripts. Little by little, the contents of more manuscripts matched up. Most of the manuscripts were correct, but thirty percent contained errors."
"Teacher Lambert died of stomach cancer. Back then, there was no Stomach Cancer Drug, let alone a Space Artificial Stomach or hibernation. As he lay dying, he instructed his daughter to give me the final box of his senior fellow apprentice's manuscripts. The contents of the first two boxes had already been published by his peers. Only the last box remained, and we didn't know whether its contents