David Pegg’s Top 25 Numbers

As part of our effort to discern the Top Numbers of Key Importance within our little universe for The Big Board-little universe Project, we studied the top 25 list of David Pegg, a reporter at The Guardian in England.

Twitter:  @davidtpegg   PGP key from MIT is here.

Of all his top 25 numbers only these are considered:

25.  Pi
Irrational, non-repeating and non-terminating number

24. Euler’s number:  2.718
Irrational, non-repeating and non-terminating number

23. Euler constant

22. Feigenbaum constant: 4.6692
Mitchell Feigenbaum in 1975

19.  0

18.  1

16. The Golden Ratio: 1.6180339887

15.  About number “5”  he says, “According to Pythagoras, the number 5 was the perfect number of human microcosm. Aristotle also added a 5th element to the 4 elements of ancient Greek studies and called it Ether, which has become the basis for most of the spiritual practices of the ancient alchemists. It also has some spiritual significance and symbolism in other cultures, including the Chinese and Japanese Buddhists. This number has also become the basis of discordianism, a jocular pseudo religion popularized by Robert Anton Wilson, which believed that everything that happens in the universe has a connection to 5 or a multiple of five.”

You Are Warmly Invited To Become Involved.

BBLU5PBUThis project is bigger than the people currently working within it. To move this project into high gear, we tried doing a Kickstarter program (December 2015) to raise awareness, to build a larger team and support structure, and to initiate pilot programs in 100 high schools across the USA.

That program did not work out but it has pushed us to find ways for others to participate.

Please come in and test the waters:

  • Founding Contributor:  Write. Recommend.  Raise awareness.  Your voice is heard and you encourage the project to go forward. If you are involved with secondary education, our short term goal is to have 100 high schools adopt the program as a Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) project.
  • Founding Associate:  There are many substantial projects within the larger project. The STEM Education Project will involve at least one person per school.  That could be you.  The project has been successfully tested with an Advanced Placement sixth-grade class.  It has also been used with all ages of high school students (7th-12th grades).
  • Research Associate:  There are just over 201 notations.  Each notation will require a team of experts who uniquely understand something about just one notation. We invite scholars and perpetual research students to help.

In teaching a high school geometry class, we backed into developing a teaching tool to bring students deeply within the current debates about the theory of everything. This project, however, is not a theory; it is simple math, simple logic, and an extension of the Planck Base Units.  It is a great platform from which to discuss TOEs, to engage the research at CERN in Geneva, and to probe the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) and other programs within astrophysics.

 

 

 

What Did We Ever Do Without Our Universe View?

1957: The Beginnings of a somewhat Integrated Universe View

In 1957 Kees Boeke’s book, Cosmic Vision, The Universe in 40 Jumps, was published; it was the first integrated view of the known universe. He could have but did not engage the Planck base units. He could have, but did not consider any geometric calculations. Yet, he did get the attention of prominent scientists including Nobel-laureate, Arthur Compton. Thereafter, the Eames film, the Phylis and Philip Morrison book, Powers of Ten, the IMAX (Smithsonian) movie (guide), and the Huang’s scale of the universe opened this conceptual door for anyone who chose to walk through it.  Anyone could begin to have an integrated view using base-10 notation of the entire universe. It was a fundamental paradigm shift; all the attention given to it has been justified.

Most of the world’s people live within what we might call, their OwnView.  Even though subjective and often quite naïve, the elitists and the solipsistic and narcissistic among us, lift up that view as the best view, the only view, and/or the right view.

If and when we start to grow up, spread our wings and begin to explore beyond our horizons, we develop an objective view of the world.  As we integrate more and more facets of our subjective and objective views, it begins to qualify as a WorldView (in the spirit of the old Weltanschauung).

In light of Boeke’s work, the next step for all of us is to bring whatever WorldView we have, and see how it fits and works within a view of the entire universe. Kees Boeke’s work is historically the very first UniverseView. Although Boeke only had 40 jumps and used base-10 exponential notation, it is still the first systematic view of the entire Universe.

2011:  A Second Universe View Emerges From Another High School

A high school geometry class just up river from the French Quarter of New Orleans developed what appears to be the second systematic UniverseView.  It is quite a bit more granular than Boeke’s work and it originated from the students’ work with simple embedded and nested geometries. Using base-2 exponential notation this  group emerged with about 202+ doublings, layers, notations, or steps from the Planck Length  to the Observable Universe.  Eventually beside each length, the calculations from the Planck Time out to the Age of the Universe were added.

This fully-integrated UniverseView first emerged in December 2011 and was officially dubbed, “Big Board – little universe.” One of the initial boards was over eight feet high and the second and third generations were around 60 inches high.  The entire universe, mathematically-and-geometrically related within 200 or so notations, seemed to bring the universe down to a manageable size!

Now, what do we do with it?

The first thought was that this UniverseView with its 200+ notations could be a good container for Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) education.  It puts everything in the known universe within a simple ordering system.  Then, in January 2012, in the process of trying to find scholarly references to understand the foundations of their work, the students and their teachers discovered Kees Boeke.  In so many ways, it was a vindication — “Somebody had been here before us.”  Yet, even with all the fanfare around Boeke’s work, not too much was done to extract meaning from that model.

The base-2 model is quite different. It has simple geometries and a more granular mathematics.  The students and teachers thought this ordering system might help to answer those historic queries by Immanuel Kant about (1) who we are, (2) why we are, (3) where we are going, and (4)  the meaning and value of life.

Given this model has a starting point and an end point, the students and teachers opted to see the universe as finite.  Always encouraging students to go deeper in their understanding of mathematics, their teacher, Bruce Camber, commented To engage the Infinite it appears that we hold the objective and subjective in a creative balance and that balance is called geometry, calculus and algebra through which we can more fully discover relations.”

Boeke’s base-10 work has an important role in history.  It gave the human family a starting point to see an ordered universe.  The base-2 model takes the next step. Instead of just adding or subtracting zeroes, it adds 3.333 times more steps or doublings. It provides more data to explore the simplest continuities, relations and dynamics within and between each notation.  Base-2 is the heart and spirit of cellular division, chemical bonding, complexification (1 & 2), and bifurcation.

Perhaps it is here that the academic community might begin to create a truly relational, integrated and functional UniverseView. Surely it is here that we find the rough-and-tumble within science.

So, although base-2 UniverseView is the second UniverseView, it seems to hold some promise.  And though these are preliminary models,  just a crack in the doorway, what a sweet and simple opening it is.  Perhaps Kepler would be proud.

This high school group is now just starting to discover the work of  real-and-graciously-open scholars.  With the help of this larger academic community, our work just might  somehow capture the spirit of one of the world great physicists throughout history, John Wheeler, when he said, “Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid for so long?”