Category: Timeline

Can A Quiet Expansion Challenge the Big Bang?

Bruce CamberLeave a comment
Legacy: The first rough draft as of Sunday, June 12, 2016

Current work (still in process)

by Bruce Camber, New Orleans

History of the Universe Not too many people question the big bang theory (herein abbreviated bbt). We do. Back in September 2014 for the first time we publicly raised questions about the bbt.

The world-renown Cambridge University physicist, Stephen Hawking, is the leading spokesperson for the bbt. He has become a rock star among scientists because he has been so successful as its primary advocate.

Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking in the PBS-TV series, Genius, first aired in May 2016

Within his May 2016 PBS-TV series, Genius, he asks rhetorically, “Where did the universe come from? The answer, as most people can tell you, is the big bang. Everything in existence, expanding exponentially in every direction,from an infinitely small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense point, creating a cosmos filled with energy and matter. But what does that really mean and where did it all begin?” His confidence also exudes from his 1988, best-selling book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, and even from his foundational writing in 1973 (co-authored with Cambridge colleague, George F. R. Ellis) the highly-technical book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time.

Only a fool would dare challenge all this work over so many years.

So, such is life; each of us must sometime play the fool. With these facts and the basic premise established, this posting is a “rough draft.” It should become a first draft by July 4. Given the depth and breadth of the foundations upon which the big bang theory (bbt) currently rests, your comments while this posting is being refined, are most welcomed. If this embedded link does not open your email browser, my address is camber (at) bblu (dot) org or go to the Contact page. There are many key images for the big bang theory such as this image above right. More images will be added over time. Most links related to the bbt go to Wikipedia pages. Images for our model, called a Quiet Expansion (QE), will be added soon.

The key to our model is multiplication by 2, starting with the Planck base units. Those pivotal Planck calculations were done in 1899 by Max Planck. Our simple work of multiplying them by 2, and then each result by 2, over and over and over again began in December 2011. We discovered that you readily emerge at the Age of the Universe and the Observable Universe, all in just 201 steps.

That is crazy, but true. It is called “base-2 exponential notation.” It’s what cells do. It’s a bit like chemical bonding. Bifurcation theory describes another element of its dynamic. In just 201 doublings, layers or groups, you can capture the entire universe in an entirely-ordered fashion! Beyond belief? Our web presence, Big Board-little universe, can provide more background about our rather brief history.

We’ve used the Wikipedia summaries of the big bang. Wikipedia appears to represent the current thinking of most within the relevant scientific communities. These scientists have lived within this theory throughout their professional careers. It is part of their intellectual being. We believe most all of their work can be absorbed within the QE. It is just from the starting point to the inflationary epoch — less than a fraction of a fraction of a second — are pointedly questioned. With a little-but-substantial tweak, we believe all the work on the subsequent epochs can be readily integrated.

The writers within the Wikipedia community overlap with those within these scientific communities. Wikipedia, constantly in the process of refining their writing, provides several summaries of the History of the Universe based on the most current work of leading thinkers within the scientific community. The work that is based on observations has a place within the QE. Our guess is that those observations will become richer and more informative when the QE parameters and boundary conditions are engaged.

Are space-and-time unbounded or bounded? If bounded, is our universe a container universe? Are the Planck base units and all the dimensionless constants part of the definitions of the boundaries between the finite and the infinite?

Within the current bbt analysis gravitational waves arise from within their inflationary period. The bbt thought leaders ascribe a much faster-than-light expansion just after the big bang. And, that begs the question: What are the preconditions of superluminal events and motion? There haven’t been any answers since 1902 when Jacobus Kapteyn made his initial observations, since the 1983 “superluminal workshop” at Jodrell Bank Observatory, and since the subsequent studies of microquasars, their accretion disks and such phenomenon as magnetorotational instability. It is all a very special language, logic and reality; the observational results are well-defined; yet, we believe the most-penetrating conclusions are pending.

In 1970 there were competing theories about the beginning of the universe. By 1990 the bbt had become dominant. In 2011 our little group of high school geometry people began to explore the interior structures of the tetrahedron and octahedron and that is when we found within our tilings and tessellations, just over 201 base-2 exponential notations from the Planck base units to the Age of the Universe and to the Observable Universe. That continuum appeared so simple, we first engaged it as an excellent STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics) tool. Yet, with further study and thought, it also seemed to challenge some of our basic commonsense assumptions about nature (the back story). As we studied our new little model, the bbt continued to solidify its dominance within the general culture and we started to question it. We began to believe that the actual physics of the first moments of creation might be better defined by the simple mathematics of a quiet expansion, especially the first 67 notations. Those 67 have never been recognized as such and certainly have not been discussed within academia. The great minds throughout the ages have been unaware of the 201+ base-2 notations and those first 67 notations. So mysterious were the 67, we began more actively to think about them and to make some postulations about their place and purpose.

Our first posting about this Quiet Expansion is a result of our naive, informal, and often idiosyncratic studies of the Planck Base Units, base-2 exponential notation, and an inherent geometry assumed (hypothesized, hypostatized, and/or imputed) to be within every scale (doubling, layer, notation, step, etc) throughout the universe. We have moved slowly. Having backed into the Planck base units from our simple exercises in a high school geometry class, we were not at all sure of ourselves. So, after observing our results for a couple of years, we began asking the question, “Could this be a more-simple, more-inclusive model of the universe than the big bang theory?” Because we only have the beginnings of an outline of a model, we continued our quest and continued to ask more questions:

Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?

Who: The history of the Big Bang Theory (bbt) is highly documented. It is an intellectual cornerstone within experimental and theoretical physics, cosmology, and astrophysics.
What: To challenge the bbt appears foolhardy at best. Yet, there are many, many reasons to challenge it, but most of all because (1) it is overly complex and confusing, (2) it is not very good philosophy, and (3) it is very poor psychology.
Why: The first three key parts of the bbt, involving substantially less than a trillionth of a second, are based on hunches and a need to shoehorn data to support the model.

Wikipedia says, “Planck scale is beyond current physical theories; it has no predictive value. The Planck epoch is assumed (or theorized) to have been dominated by quantum effects of gravity.” We say that the Planck scale is the starting point for the initial 24 notations (de facto defined by the bbt) and that these notations are shared by everything, everywhere in the universe. Painfully aware of the limitations of our vocabulary, these first notations are considered to be archetypal forms, structure and substance. Archetypal is used in the sense of the original pattern or model by which all things of the same type are representations, the prototype, or a perfect example. For more, see each of the four pages (24 columns) encapsulating notations 1-24 (opens in a new window or tab).

Both models have made key assumptions. We believe the QE model is internally more consistent, imaginative, and stimulating.

The key: More than just the bbt‘s four forces of nature within the Planck scale, we assume a certain unification of all five Planck base units and those constants that define them, and that this unification is carried through the entire 201+ notations to the current time and present day (until proven to be otherwise). The Planck base units are defined by length, time, mass, temperature and charge. These Planck units are further defined by the speed of light (or special relativity), the gravitational constant (or general relativity), the reduced Planck constant (or ħ or quantum mechanics), the Coulomb constant (or ε0 or electric charge or electromagnetism), and the Boltzmann constant (or kB or of temperature).

The Planck scale is not beyond logic, numbers, and conceptual integrity. Homogeneity, isotropy and simple logic rule. Yet, within the Quiet Expansion (QE) model, we have followed a simple logic and placed the Planck Temperature at the top of the scale, just beyond the 201st notation and then it goes down, approaching Absolute Zero. We are increasingly finding a simple relational logic between the Planck base units. Of course, this logic will be revisited with every future analysis of the QE model. Within the QE model, the Planck Charge, a Coulombs value, is taken as it is given. Within the bbt, the Planck Charge is ignored and the bbt value is postulated to be as large as possible. Their measurement is given in GeV units, one billion electron volts. Add 1016 zeroes to it and you have a charge unlike any other! It is the penultimate, grand assumption that truly requires a leap of faith!

To begin to understand all these numbers and their correlations, questions are asked, “Are these all non-repeating, never-ending numbers like Pi? Are all numbers that are non-repeating and never-ending somehow part of the infinite yet also the beginning of quantum mechanics?” The suggestion has been made that we carry out each number 10 decimal places, and if need be, 100 decimal places, and possibly even 1000 decimal places, to see if patterns can be discerned.

The QE model holds that things are simple before complex and everything is related to everything. Imputed, hypostatized and/or hypothesized are pointfree vertices and simple geometries as the deep infrastructure that gives rise to the work on combinatorics, cellular automaton, cubic close packing, bifurcation theory (and the Feigenbaum’s constants), Langlands program, mereotopology ( point-free geometry), the 80-known binary operations, and scalar field theory. Here are people working on theories and constructions of the simple, yet their concepts are anything but simple.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When: In the very beginning… Wikipedia says that the Planck epoch requires speculative proposals, a “New Physics” such as “…the Hartle–Hawking initial state, string landscape, string gas cosmology, and the ekpyrotic universe.” Each is a conceptually-rich, dense jungle of ideas. Cutting through that entanglement is only for the highly-motivated and academically astute. Most of us will just go on to the grand unification epoch, in search of a logical system that builds consistently upon itself. About the bbt model, Wikipedia simply says, “The three forces of the Standard Model are unified.” Of course, the QE goes much further, however, first consider a bbt problem. Electromagnetism, gravitation, weak nuclear interaction, and strong nuclear interaction are most often related to relations defined above the 65th notation.

Wikipedia says, “Cosmic inflation expands space by a factor of the order of 1026 over a time of the order of 10−33 to 10−32 seconds.[1] The universe is supercooled from about 1027 down to 1022 kelvins.[6] The Strong Nuclear Force becomes distinct from the Electroweak Force.” [1] (Our emphasis) First, consider that the Planck Temperature is 1.416 83×1032 Kelvin. The bbt totally skips the cooling from 1032 to 1027 Kelvin. It does not address what causes the cooling to 1022 Kelvin. Also, consider the amount of expansion and the short duration assumed in their statement above. To create that much space in that short of an interval would require light to travel so far beyond its normal speed, it would constitute the penultimate anomaly.

Also, because the bbt begins at the Planck Temperature, they truly need a supercooled concept. With the Quiet Expansion these temperatures are all superconducting being well below the superconducting transition temperatures. Perhaps the very concept of temperature will become better understood as a result of our struggles to define a different model of the universe.

About this inflationary epoch, Wikipedia says, “The forces of the Standard Model have separated, but energies are too high for quarks to coalesce into hadrons, instead forming a quark-gluon plasma. These are the highest energies directly observable in experiment in the Large Hadron Collider.”

Within the QE, if a quark-gluon plasma requires 1012 Kelvin, it is not possible until up around Notation 136 where the temperature is up to 1.92016×1012 Kelvin. Notation 136 is 4.6965×10-3 seconds from the singularity. One second is between Notations 143 and 144. Also, the Kelvin scale is counter-intuitive in many ways. The temperature of the Sun is about 5,778 K. Within the QE, that is expressed between Notations 107 and 108 (7.153178×103 K). The human temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is 310.15 Kelvin which is between Notations 103 and 104 (4.47073×102 K). Also, at Notation 103 we find the Planck Length is now .163902142 millimeters or 1.63902142×10-4 meters or about the size of a human egg.

The exacting nature of the correlations between the multiples of the Planck base units is just being explored for the first time. Within the QE everything everywhere is related through simple mathematics.

In Wikipedia, their category experts say, “The physics of the electroweak epoch is less speculative and much better understood than the physics of previous periods of the early universe. The existence of W and Z bosons has been demonstrated, and other predictions of electroweak theory have been experimentally verified.”

Finally the the bbt gives us something that isn’t incomplete or highly speculative. Yet, even with such assurance, the logic of the bbt is difficult to follow. Again, within the QE model the only duration that would allow for W and Z bosons is about 30 notations away, somewhere around notation 65. There is just not enough “conceptual” space and time for elementary particles and their effects.

By the way, within this simple, highly-integrated progression, there is the first measurement that has a visceral meaning for us. At Notation 32 the mass of the universe is 93.48 kilograms or about 206 pounds. By Notation 40 it is up to 2.39×104 kilograms. The universe is bulking up quickly and it is creating space and time as it goes.

Also, consider this unusual concept: within every notation, the QE model aggregates base-8 pointfree vertices using scaling laws and dimensional analysis (recommended by Prof. Dr. Freeman Dyson). There are single line entries for both the base-2 and base-8 progressions within the horizontally-scrolled chart.

— most active edit area—

Big Bang Theory (bbt)

Planck epoch
Planck time:
<10−43 seconds
~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Planck Temperature:
1032 Kelvin
~
Planck Energy:
1019 GeV
First key bbt error

Grand
unification
epoch
<10−36 seconds
~
1016 GeV
(gigaelectronvolts)

Inflationary epoch
Electroweak epoch
<10−33 s to <10−32 seconds
(QE syncs to bbt time.)
1028 K to 1022 Kelvin
~
Expansion: 1026 meters
Editor: “science fiction”
Second key bbt error
~

Quark epoch
Third error: >10−31 to
>10−12 seconds
1012 Kelvin
Notice there is a bbt/QE convergence

Hadron epoch
10−6 seconds to
10−1 seconds
1010 Kelvin to

109 Kelvin

Lepton epoch
1 second to
10 seconds
109 K
Note: QE temp higher

Photon epoch-Nucleosynthesis
10 seconds to
103 seconds to
1013 seconds
<380 ka
~
1011 Kelvin to
109 Kelvin to
103 Kelvin
10 MeV to
100 keV
~

Matter-dominated era
47 ka (47,000 years) to
10 Ga (10×109) years
~
104 Kelvin to
4 Kelvin

Recombination
380 ka (380,000 years)
~
4000 Kelvin

Dark Ages
380 ka to
150 Ma (Mega-annus) or
150 million years
~
4000 Kelvin to
60 Kelvin

Stelliferous Era
150 Ma
(150 million years)
100 Ga
(150 billion years)
60 Kelvin to
0.03 Kelvin

Reionization
~150 Ma to
1 Ga
~
>60 K to
19 K

Galaxy formation and evolution
1 Ga to 10 Ga
19 Kelvin to 4 Kelvin

Dark-energy-dominated era
>10 Ga
<4 K

Present time
13.8 Ga
2.7 Kelvin

Quiet Expansion (QE)

Notations 0-24

0 = Planck base units
Planck time:
5.39106×10−44 seconds
Notation 1: 1.0782−43 s
Notation 24: 1.809×10−36 (s)
Notation 0: 1.416×1032 Kelvin
Notation 1: 4.4×10-27 (K)
Notation 24: 3.69×10-20 (K)
Notation 0: 1.8×10-18 Coulombs
Notation 1: 3.7×10-18 (C)
Notation 24: 3.14×10-11 (C)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notations 25 to 31
Notation 25: 1.8×10−36 seconds
Notation 31: 1.157×10−34 (s)
Notation 25: 6.29×10-11 (C)
Notation 31: 4.02×10-9 (C)

Notations 32 to 40
~
Notation 32: 2.31×10−34 seconds
Notation 40: 5.927×10−32 (s)
Notation 32: 1.89×10-19 Kelvin
Notation 40: 2.42×10-17 (K)
Notation 32: 6.94×10-26 meters
Notation 40: 1.77×10-23 (m)
Notation 32: 8.05×10-9 Coulombs
Notation 40: 2.06×10-6 (C)

Notations 41 to 104
Notation 41: 1.18×10−31 seconds
Notation 104: 1.09×10−12 (s)
Notation 41: 4.84×10-17 Kelvin
Notation 104: 4.47×102 (K)
(310K = 98.33°F, 36.85° C)

Notation 105 to 142
Notation 105: 2.18×10−12 (s)
Notation 142: 3.0×10−1 (s)
Notation 105: 8.94×102 Kelvin
Notation 142: 6.14×1013 (K)

Notations 143 to 147
Notation 143: 6.01×10−1 (s)
Notation 147: 9.61 (s)
Notation 143: 2.45×1014 Kelvin
Notation 147: 3.93×1015 (K)

Notations 147 to 154 to
Notation 187
Notation 147: 9.6185 seconds
Notation 154: 1231.1 (s)
Notation 187: 1.05×1013 (s)
or 10,575,741,215,500 (s)
or 320± thousand years
Notation 147: 3.932×1015 Kelvin
Notation 154: 5.03×1017 (K)
Notation 187: 4.32×1027 (K)
Notation 147: 3.346×1026 (C)
Notation 154: 4.28×1028 (C)
Notation 187: 3.67×1038 (C)

Notations 184 to 201
Notation 184: 1,321,967,651,940 seconds or 41,919.31 years
Notation 201: 10 billion years
Notation 184: 5.4×1026 Kelvin
Notation 201: 7.0×1031 (K)

Notations 187
10,575,741,215,500 (s)
320± thousand years
Notation 187: 3.6×1038 (C)

Notations 187 to 196
Notations 187: 320,000+ years
Notation 196:
171.2± million years
5,414,779,502,320,000 seconds
Notations 187: 4.3×1027 Kelvin
Notations 196: 2.2×1030 (K)

Notations 187 to 204+
Notation 196:
171.2± million years
Notation 204+:
Distant future
Notations 196: 2.2×1030 (K)
Notation 204: 1.416×1032 (K)

Notations 187 to 189
Notation 187: 1.05×1013 seconds
or 320± thousand years to
Notation 189: 1.3± million years
Notation 187: 4.32×1027 Kelvin
Notation 189: 1.72×1028 (K)

Notations 187 to
Notation 201+
Notation 189: 1.3± million years
Notation 201: 10 billion years

Notations 187 to
Notation 201+
Notation 201: 10 billion years
Notation 201: 7.08×1031 Kelvin

Notation 201+
Notation 201: 13.8 billion years
Notation 201: 7.08×1031 Kelvin
At the 41st notation there are 10,633,823,966,279,326,983,230,456,482,242,756,608 pointfree vertices. The base-2 simple doublings could be aggregating structure as groups or sets. Defined by the Planck base units, in the range 41-to-60, we hypothesize that these are the domains for archetypal relations and systems. There are 549,755,813,888 base-2 pointfree vertices at Notation 41 and 5,070,602,400,912,917,605,986,812,821,504 at Notation 104.

The bbt’s Quark Epoch generalizes 63 of the QE notations, from 41 to 104. These notations within the QE model are foundational so perhaps this comparison to Quark Epoch is a key. Consider the estimated requirement for temperature. The bbt epochs can not begin until the temperature is cool enough. Given that temperature requirement, within the QE model, the Quark Epoch would not begin until up-and-around Notation 136 where the temperature has finally risen to 1.9201×1012 Kelvin. If that is the right range, as suggested by proponents of the bbt, less than a second has transpired, the universe has a diameter of about 874 square miles and a mass of about 1.896×1032 kilograms.

Within the QE model from around Notations 65 to 69 is the transition from the small scale to the human scale. This “human scale” is the middle third of the 201 notations, i.e. 67-to-134. Even though two-thirds of the way through the 201 doublings, less than a second has transpired from the start.

In the Quark Epoch the bbt and QE begin to cross paths and overlap. Wikipedia says, “Quarks are bound into hadrons. Over the hadron epoch, the process of baryogenesis results in an elimination of anti-hadrons (baryon asymmetry).” As noted within Wikipedia, some of these perceptions come directly out of the laboratory, such as CERN in Geneva, where this phenomenon has been observed. So, other than the improbable placement within the time/temperature curve, all processes herein after become readily integrated within the QE model. The bbt and QE have overlapped and begun to become simpatico.

A key question within the QE model is, “What is a notation?” Also known as a cluster, doubling, group, layer, set, and/or step, each word is perspectival and each notation is dynamic, always in the process of being defined, right up to the current time within the 201st notation. Each notation has an active role in defining who we are and what this universe is; and, each notation has an active role in defining all other notations. Today, right now, all of these notations activelyf define humanity or the human scale (67-to-134), must therefore be something like the archetypes of forms and functions (notations 1-to-67) that define our deeper beingness. The notations from 134-to-200 define our planetary and galactic systems and this is where most of the work of those physicists, cosmologist, and astrophysicists have worked.

In just a few more notations, between 142 and 143, the universe is at the one second mark. This measurement is most often used to determine the speed of light. Yet, as noted in earlier postings, within every notation, the Planck length divided by the multiple of the Planck Time renders an approximation of the speed of light. It is just commonsense when we see that the speed of light plays prominently in the definitions of Planck Length and Planck Time.

The question to be answered, “What is the meaning of temperature? …within the bbt? Within the QE model, we impute that it is the total temperature throughout the area defined by the notation (or cluster, container, domain, doubling, group, layer, or step). This measurement within the Hadron Epoch within the bbt is now lower than it is within the QE. There is a natural correlation between all these numbers within the QE simply because they start with the same definitional characteristics (the Planck base units) and the evolution of those numbers using base-2 exponential notation. The ratio of length to temperature renders .73322+ ratio. That result is currently being analyzed, space-to-temperature or kelvin per meters.

In 1972 George Ellis and Stephen Hawking began to explore the boundary conditions that define our universe between 10-13 centimeters (elementary particles) and 1028 cm, the assumed radius of the universe. They did not approach the Planck base units which would have expanded their range to 1.616199×10−35 meters (Planck Length) and then it would have tucked them in at about 5.1942×1025 meters according to current best guesses regarding the Age of the Universe.

Universe

With very few exceptions, it was not until Frank Wilczek (MIT) wrote a series of articles,
in 2001, Scaling Mt. Planck, (Physics Today), did anybody think these Planck numbers amounted to anything more than numerology. It would take another ten more years before we would come along, naively doing our thing with base-2 exponential notation, so we are confident that all the proponents of the big bang have not engaged our quiet expansion model.

Earlier it was observed that the big bang is not good philosophy and it is bad psychology. Philosophy is taken as a study of first principles and systems, the universals and constants that create the boundary conditions as well as the continuity equations that bind our universe together. Since 1972, especially with the very key question about the very nature of the first microseconds, the bbt has not progressed very far. Their Planck epoch is still mysterious. It is bad psychology for that very reason. It is so disjointed, so out of touch with anything human, it de facto promotes a certain form of nihilism.

Theories should have elegance, beauty, coherence, and simplicity. Children should be able
to begin to understand. And with the QE, children quickly begin to understand 2 times 2.
We just have to carry it out a few more places for them.

***

Disclaimer: Our charts and discussion are our first time to make a comparative analysis
between the big bang theory (herein abbreviated bbt) and our Quiet Expansion (QE).
Silly errors are inevitable. We are neophytes, not scholars, within these fields,
so please point out any of our failures with logic, math, and physics. We will be most grateful.

This ends the first story about two very different models of the universe. Of course, it is a story that is to be continued.

 

1947 – 2016

EditorLeave a comment
Please note: This timeline was first posted within the website for the television series on PBS-TV, Small Business School. Many links still go to those original postings. Often new tabs or windows will open. If not, use your back button to return to this page. Thank you.

A rough timeline for Bruce Camber

July 2016: A Quiet Expansion (versus a big bang)

May 2016:  Notations 1-200: A simple, integrated model of the universe. 

January 2016:  On Constructing the Universe From Scratch

December 2015:  Top Ten Reasons to Engage the Big Board-little universe

October 2015: Working articles, A Simple View Of The Universe (also on LinkedIn), On Developing A Rationale For A Working Model Of The Universe Based On A Quiet Expansion

March 2015: Introduced three additional Planck Units —  mass, charge and temperature — to the 201+ doublings (groups, layers, steps)  of Planck Time and Planck Length using base-2 exponential notation.  The speed of light is mathematically confirmed between notations or doublings 142 and 143. Also, a summary overview highlights twelve key ideas.

December 2014:  Tracked Planck Time using base-2 exponential notation alongside the Planck Length.

July 2014:  Timeline.  Asked the question, Finite or Infinite: Is that the question? in pursuit of the Theory of Indivisibles. Also, wrote the two summary articles: Order in the Universe and 15 Key Points.  Awarded a USPTO patent: TOT lines for construction – initial projects in NOLA.

December 2013:  Updating a working article about the evolution of the Big Board – little universe project.   We developed a little tour through it. Students began using the board to explore the very nature of science and knowledge.

March 2012:  Wrote an overview of the Big Board attempting to use the format and style of Wikipedia.  It was conditionally accepted by some Wikipedia editors in mid-April. It was indexed on the web for the last two weeks of April before being deleted on May 2, 2012 as original research. The intention was to have that work force us to find the primary reference articles that could justify using these concepts in the way we were using them.

December 19, 2011:  Substituted again.  Initiated the Big Board of our little universe.

March 2011: Asked to substitute for high school geometry classes to focus on the platonic solids. Engaged the icosahedron and dodecahedron.  Developed models of a cumulative or Pentakis dodecahedron.

2009:  Move to New Orleans from California to re-open a small production studio, to have a place for an Institute for Perfection Studies, and to launch the local productions in each DMA in the USA and each country around the world.

2008:  Stopped productions to initiate local productions by each station in the USA and country-by-country around the world.

2001:  Re-branded the show for the third time.  Small Business School clears on 200+ stations in the USA (PBS-TV) and thousands worldwide through the Voice of America-TV

1999.  Began streaming our first television shows on the web.

1997:  Modeling project with tetrahedron and octahedrons begins.

1994 – 2008:  Television producer, Small Business (1) Today,   (2) 2000, and (3) School

Learned about the death of a friend, David Bohm (1992). Thought about a visit with him in 1977 and his little book,  “Fragmentation and Wholeness”  and now I asked the question, “What is inside the tetrahedron?”

Opened our first web site in December 1994. Broadcast a weekly half-hour about best business practices for over 50 seasons (14+ years) via PBS-TV stations throughout the USA and  via the Voice of America-TV (weekdays on nine global satellites) around the world. Re-broadcast by Dubai Business Channel and CCTV-9 in China.

1990-1993:  Consultant for IBM

1986-1992:  Software developer focused on PARC, object-oriented programming.

1983-1992:  Business Consultant

1982: One of IBM’s first small business partners, outperformed the nation,  won a corvette.

January 1981:  Re-engaged with a company that I had started in 1971.  Within two years we had over 100 employees.

January 1980:  Resident Theologian, The American Church in Paris, studying with Olivia Costa de Beauregard and JP Vigier of the Institut Henri Poincaré.  By the end of that year, got a job.

August 1979:  Coordinated a display project at MIT for the World Council of Churches with 77 of the world’s leading, living scholars at that time (that list is linked from here).

October 1977.  Visited with David Bohm in London focused on points, lines, triangles and the tetrahedron.  Discussed it all in a meeting with Carl Friedrich von Weisäcker.

September 1975.  Began doctoral program on perfected-states in space-time and the Hypostatic Union. Primary focus was on the EPR Paradox and the work of John Bell at CERN.  Visited Bell at CERN as a guest of a former director-general, Victor Weisskopf (chairman, MIT Physics) and Lew Kowarski.  Studied extensively with John Findlay and briefly with Hans Gadamer.

January 1973.  Matriculated at BU STH studying the foundations of physics as related to the foundations of theology.  Engaged the aRb, the subject-object discussions using the expression, “The Relation is the Primary Real and space and time, subject and object, are derivative.” Through the Boston Theological Institute, studied with Arthur McGill, Harvard, focused on hypostatic constructs within Austin Farrer’s 1943 book, Finite and Infinite.

December 1972.  Bob Cohen, chairman of BU’s Physics Department and the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, asks me to discuss perfection concepts with Harry Oliver at the BU School of Theology. Oliver and Dean J. Robert Nelson extend an invitation to study with them. Awarded two fellowships to pay for it all.

January 1971. Started a business, became associated with a think tank in Cambridge (Synectics), and began focusing on perfected moments in space-time. Began studying the physics, philosophy and psychology of perfected states. Re-engaged John Wesley. Became affiliated with a mid-week evening lecture-debate group regarding first-principles in physics. It involved some of the finest within academia in the Boston area and from around the world. Became affiliated with the Philomorphs with Arthur Loeb (Carpenter Arts Center) at Harvard’s Sever Hall. Bucky Fuller was an associate.

January 1970. Became the first full-time employee (without title) functioning as an Executive Director to organize congressional conferences in DC, fund-raising events throughout NYC, full-page ads in the NY Times and WSJ, a Madison Square Garden Rally, and meetings about global priorities, i.e., Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk (in Toronto).

October 1969.  Engaged the Fund for New Priorities in America while attending  the Graduate School of New School for Social Research. Working on a masters degree on the foundations of creativity focusing on Carl Jung’s philosophy of archetypes and the Platonic Eidos. Taught 2nd grade special studies in PS 48x, Hunts Point, Bronx.

January 1967. Work with E. Paul Torrance of the Univ. Georgia using his Creativity Testing with pre-schoolers.

September 1965  Matriculate at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC  June 1965: Graduate from Wilmington HS in Massachusetts.

November 1963  Joined the Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard University, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and actively studied the formation of national and global political priorities.

October 1962  Studied interior geometrical structure and possibly came up with a new corollary

July 20, 1959  Eye accident, traumatic impact, dislocation (dramatic dreams)

July 20, 1952  Fascinated with a Brownie Camera, inverted images, and the nature of light

July 20, 1947  Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts

Scholars Selected For The Display Project at MIT, An Architecture for Integrative Systems

EditorLeave a comment

This page evolves from a 1979 global dialogue between scholars in the natural sciences, the humanities and theology. It was originally formulated to provide discussion materials for a conference at MIT entitled, Faith, Science and the Human Future.   It is re-created here as a template for the Big Board – little universe.

The purpose of this project was to summarize those comprehensive worldviews and powerfully suggestive ideas of living scholars (bold equals the “still living” the last time we checked!).  All vetted back in 1979 within their community as leading thinkers, the hope was that there might be a dynamic exchange and synthesis of ideas and information that would open new and deeper insights and wisdom. Based on their experiences, observations, historical analysis, hypotheses and testing, informed speculations, and even visionary insights, each person’s  work was placed within one of three perspectives: The Small-Scale Universe, The Human-Scale Universe, and The Large-Scale Universe.  And then, with each perspective, there were three groups of scholars: (1) Natural Scientists, (2) Philosophers/Theologians and (3) The Boldly Speculative.

Small-Scale Universe To Be – Reality. What is it?
Scholars seek to define fundamental units of reality, experience and/or being.		 Human Scale Universe
To Know – Ways of Knowing.
Scholars seek to understand basic interactions from cells to populations of people. What makes life human?
What gives life meaning?		 Large-Scale Universe
To Envision the Cosmos
Scholars seek to understand cosmology — the parts, laws, and operations of the universe. They seek to know the origin and nature of the universe.
1979 : – All Living Scholars. Selected by their peers Listings are alphabetical listings of
Scientists, Philosophers and Theologians.  Each listings is followed by a school designation and links go to published work.
•  Ian Barbour, Carleton, Northfield (MN)
Issues in Science and Religion		 •  Michael Arbib, Massachusetts, UCLA
Brains, Machines and Mathematics		 •  Hannes Alfven, Uppsala, Stockholm
Cosmic Plasma
•  Ted Bastin, Cambridge
Quantum Theory & Beyond		 •  Peter Berger, Boston College
The Sacred Canopy		 •  Hermann Bondi, London
The cosmological scene
 •  Charles Birch, Sydney
Biology and the Riddle of Life		 •  Percy Brand Blanshard, Yale
The Nature of Thought		 •  Margaret & Geoffrey Burbidge, UCSD (CA)
The Abundances of the Elements
•  David Bohm, Birbeck, London
Fragmentation & Wholeness		 •  Kenneth Boulding, Colorado
The World as a Total System		 •  Buckminster Fuller, Pennsylvania
Synergetics I & II
•  Mario Bunge, McGill, Montreal
Treatise on Basic Philosophy		 •  Erwin Chargaff,Columbia
Heraclitean Fire		 •  Stephen Hawking, Cambridge
On the Shoulders of Giants
•  Fritjof Capra, Lawrence Berkeley
The Tao of Physics		 •  Noam Chomsky, MIT
Language and Mind		 •  Fred Hoyle, Cambridge, Cal Tech
Ten Faces of the Universe
•  John Cobb, Claremont (CA)
Process Studies		 •  Freeman Dyson, Princeton
Disturbing the Universe		 •  Stanley Jaki, Seton Hall (NJ)
Science and Creation
•  Richard Feynman, Cal Tech
Theory of Fundamental Processes		 •  John Eccles, SUNY-Buffalo
Understanding of the Brain		 •  Bernard Lovell, Manchester, JBO
Emerging Cosmology: Convergence
•  Lewis Ford, Old Dominion, Norfolk (VA)
Lure of God		 •  Richard Falk, Princeton
A Study of Future Worlds		 •  Roger Penrose
The Emperor’s New Mind
•  Sheldon Glashow, Harvard
The charm of physics		 •  Paul K. Feyerabend, Berkeley
Science in a Free Society		 •  Arno Penzias,  Bell Labs (NJ)
The Origin of the Elements
•  David Griffin, Claremont (CA)
Archetypal Process		 •  John N. Findlay, Oxford, Boston
Plato: The Written and Unwritten		 •  Carl Sagan, Cornell
Contact  and  Cosmos
•  Charles Hartshorne, Chicago
The Zero Fallacy		 •  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidelberg
Truth and Method		 •  Fred A. Wolf
The Dreaming Universe
•  Krishnamurti, California
The First and Last Freedom		 •  Langdon Gilkey, Chicago
Maker of Heaven and Earth		 •  Tarthang Tulku (Berkeley, CA)
Time, Space, and Knowledge
•  H. Pierre Noyes, Stanford
Bit-String Physics		 •  Steven Grossberg, Boston
Studies of Mind and Brain		 •  Steven Weinberg, Harvard, Texas
The First Three Minutes
•  Shubert Ogden, SMU, Dallas (TX)
On Theology		 •  Jürgen Habermas, Max Planck, Starnberg
The Fear of Freedom		 •  Yakov B. Zel’dovich
Creation of particles in cosmology
•  Harold Oliver, Boston
A Relational Metaphysic		 • Gerald Holton, Harvard
Scientific Imagination

Living Scholars Today

Who shall we add in each
category?   Who are today’s
leading living scholars?
•  Gian-Carlo Rota,  MIT
Foundations of Combinatorics		 •  William Johnston, Sophia, Japan
Still Point
•  Julian Schwinger, UCLA
Einstein’s Legacy		 •  Gustavo Lagos, Chile
(in process)		 •  John Baez, UCR (CA)
Knots and quantum gravity
•  Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley
Mindful Universe		 •  Erwin Laszlo, UN
Systems View of the World		 •  Lisa Randall, Harvard
Warped Passages
•  Victor Weisskopf, MIT
The Joy of Insight		 •  Bernard Lonergan, Regis
Insight: A Study of Human Understanding		 •  Richard Dawkins, Oxford
The Magic of Reality
•  Carl F. von Weizsäcker, Max-Planck (Starnberg)
The Structure of Physics		 •  Lynn Margulis, Massachusetts (Amherst)
Early Life		 •  Daniel Shechtman, Technion
Icosahedral Quasiperiodic Phase
•  John Wheeler, Princeton, Texas
Spacetime Physics		 •  Ali A. Mazrui, Michigan, SUNY-Binghamton
A World Federation of Cultures		 •  Jim Yong Kim, World Bank,
Dartmouth, Toward a Golden Age
•  Eugene Wigner, Princeton
Symmetries & Reflections		 •  Marvin Minsky, MIT
The Society of Mind		 •  Ben J. Green, Cambridge
On arithmetic structures…
•  Jürgen Moltmann, Tübingen
The Spirit of Life		 •  Brian Green, Columbia (NYC)
The Elegant Universe

The selection committee

Included Marx Wartofsky,
J. Robert Nelson, Alan Olson, and Bill Henneman, all of Boston University.

 •  Wolfhart Pannenburg, Munich
Theology and the Philosophy of Science		 • Agnieszka Zalewska, Krakow, CERN
Large Hadron Collider
•  Karl Popper, London
All Life Is Problem Solving		  

Every scholar selected was also invited to nominate others.

 •  Karl Pribam, Stanford
The End of Certainty		  

Every scholar was also invited to critique the selections.

 •  Ilya Prigogine, Brussels
The End of Certainty
Bruce Camber initiated and
coordinated this effort.		 • Karl Rahner
Theological Investigations
A back story of its development is linked here. • Theodore Roszak, San Francisco State
The Making of a Counter Culture.

• Huston Smith, Syracuse
The World’s Religions
• William I. Thomson, Lindisfarne
Passages about Earth

An Architecture for Integrative Systems

Bruce CamberLeave a comment

A speculative conceptual frame of reference

Who would disagree with the observation that our world has deep and seemingly unsolvable problems? It is obvious there is something missing. So, what is it? Is it ethics, morality, common sense, patience, virtues like charity, hope and love?  We have hundreds of thousands of books, organizations and thoughtful people who extol all of these and more.  The lists are robust.  The work is compelling, but obviously it is not quite compelling enough.

Everybody seems to have their own unique spin to solve the world’s problems. Yet, we have discovered that one person’s spin does not easily integrate with another. Listen to those with their finger on nuclear triggers and those who are trying to be among them.  Thoughtful people in every part of the globe are deeply concerned.

MIT.gif

In 1977 I was smitten with some of the insights of a theoretical physicist, David Bohm. He gathered a group of graduate students together to be like a child to examine everything we knew about points, lines, triangles and tetrahedrons. We were trying to discern what makes for fragmentation and what makes for wholeness.

In 1979 I proposed and developed a display project at MIT to focus on first principles within the major academic disciplines. For that project, I wrote, “The human future is becoming increasingly complex and problematical.  Proposals for redirecting human energies toward basic, realizable, and global values appear simplistic. Nevertheless, the need for such a vision is obvious.”

WhatIsLife

The focus was on cross-disciplinary scholarship of leading thinkers around the world who were attempting to define a more integrative and comprehensive understanding of physical nature and of human nature.  There were 77 scholars selected.

***

That was 1979.  Progress has been slow.  There is an obvious bottleneck somewhere. And, that is what this next posting seeks to address.

***

“There’s a bottleneck somewhere, Houston.”

May 2007.  I believe a simple conceptual bottleneck that has been starring at us for many, many centuries exists in pure geometry.  I may be totally mistaken, but  I do not believe our best scholars throughout time and around the world have answered  three very simple, basic questions:

1.  What are the simplest three-dimensional structures?

2.  What is most simply and perfectly enclosed within those structures?

3.  What is most simply and perfectly enclosed within each of those parts?

When David Bohm died in 1992, I took down his little book, Fragmentation & Wholeness, he had given me in class and I started reading just one more time.  Then, it hit me. “What is perfectly enclosed within the tetrahedron?” I did not know.  “Four half-sized tetrahedrons and an octahedron.”  Discovering what was inside the octahedron was a major breakthrough for me.  Since 1994 I have asked literally hundreds of people those three questions. Chemists, biologists, architects, mathematicians, physicists, crystallographers, geologists, and geometers — few had quick answers.  Only one, John Conway,  had an answer to the third question.

The tetrahedron.  The answer to the first question is the basic building block of biology, chemistry, geometry and physics.  The answer is the tetrahedron. Many, many people answered that question.  The tetrahedron has four sides and is made of four equilateral triangles.  It is not a pyramid  (that has a square base and it is half of an octahedron).

What is perfectly enclosed within the tetrahedron? The answer to this second question eluded most people.  To figure out the simple answer,  divide each of the six edges of the tetrahedron in half and connect the points.  You will quickly see a tetrahedron in each of the four corners, but there is a middle object and it often requires a model to see it.

You will discover the octahedron, four of its faces are the “middle”  face of the tetrahedron, and four are interior.

The octahedron. The answer to that third question requires a quick analysis of the octahedron. Only one person knew the answer to the question, “What is perfectly enclosed within an octahedron?” Yet, he hesitated and said, “Let’s figure it out.”  That was Princeton professor, John Conway, who invented surreal numbers and is one of the most renown geometers living in the world today.

Octohedron

Within each corner there is an octahedron. There are six corners. With each face is a tetrahedron. There are eight faces. The tape inside define four hexagonal plates that share a common center point. Notice the tape comes in four different colors.

Here are two of our most basic structures in the physical world and most people do not know what objects are most simply enclosed by each. Yet, these are simple exercises. School children should have quick answers to all three questions. We should know how both are generated from the simple sphere. Most of us haven’t a clue.

When questioned about my focus on this gateway to interior space, my standard answer is, “…because we do not know.”  And, as I look through the history of knowledge, I do not know why it hasn’t been part of our education. It is too simple.

This simplicity became the basis for my first principles.

Why pursue this domain of information?

First, it is there to be examined. It is what is. This is not speculative. It just is. Second, it is truly rich with more information. Third, and here I’ll be speculative, it just may open a door to some of the most basic, unanswered academic questions that, if answered, might build bridges and open new ways to an integrative understanding of life (this link goes to such a door that opened on December 19, 2011).

I will predict that once more of the complexity-yet-simplicity of these basic interior relations are discerned, the mathematics will follow and these forms will beget new functions as we discovered within nanotechnologies, i.e. nanoparticles   (buckyballs  or fullerenes) and quasiparticles (Dan Shechtman’s work).  I believe the results will impact every major discipline, including religion, ethics, ontology, epistemology and cosmology.

In physics we’ll have a new look at the weak and strong interactions,  gravity and polarity or electromagnetism, and  deep internal symmetry transformations.

In chemistry, the four hexagonal plates crisscrossing the center point should open a new understanding of bonding.  I even believe there will be a new science of “cross-dimensional bonding” in quantum chemistries.

Within biology, the sciences of RNA/DNA sequencing, genomics, applied biosystems, and even quantum biology will go deeper and become more cohesive.

In psychology, learning, memory, and even identity can be more richly addressed.

This apparent intellectual oversight does not seem to know any physical, cultural, religious or political boundaries.  I have not been able to find references to the interiority of simple structures in any culture to date.

Surely my friends who have worked with R. Buckminster Fuller and Arthur Loeb, would take exception to the comment.  Yet,  Bucky’s two volumes, Synergetics I and Synergetics II, are virtually impermeable to the average person and neither work has been widely used for common tasks or applied sciences.  Buckyballs or fullerenes are now being used widely within nanotechnologies, but that is all in its earliest stages of development as a reduction-to-practice.

The answer to the question about the octahedron renders a model with a profound complexity and simplicity.  Again, if you can picture an eight-sided object, essentially the two square bases of the pyramid pushed together, you’ll have an image of an  octahedron.

Divide each of the edges in half and connect the points.  You will find an octahedron in each of the four corners of the base square and an octahedron on the top and bottom.  In each of the eight faces is a tetrahedron.

There are very few models of the parts and whole relation.  There are fewer still that describe the interior relations of these objects.

Let us take a look.

This third picture from the top in the right column is of a tetrahedron.  There is a tetrahedron in each of the four corners and an octahedron in the middle.

The fourth picture is the octahedron.  Again, there is an octahedron in each of the six corners and a tetrahedron in each face.

TOT.jpg

The TOT.  Th picture on the right is a tetrahedral-octahedral-tetrahedral truss or chain. I dubbed it a TOT line. The first time I thought I was observing it in action as a trusss system to support the undulating roof system of the Kansai Airport in Japan. In February 2007, I realized that truss was actually just half a TOT when I actually made the model pictured here. It is a simple parallelogram that can be found in many basic geometry textbooks. However, I have not yet found this tetrahedral-octahedral chain examined in depth.

Geologists have been studying natural tetrahedral-octahedral layers within nature that is known as a TOT layer.  We will look extensively at the natural occurrences of TOT formations much later in this work.

In the photograph, it is two tetrahedrons facing on an edge with an octahedron in the middle.  Each face of the TOT is an equilateral triangle on the surface which, of course, opens to the inner cavity of either an octahedron  or a tetrahedron.

These are simple models that have been largely unexamined by the academic communities.

Towards a Theory of Everything Similar

With the TOT line, I believe we are looking at the structure of perfection.  Pure geometry.  And, I believe that geometry once expressed in the physical world, manifested within space and time, becomes rather randomly quantized and infinitely variegated.

I believe our chemists should look into chemical bonding that goes beyond  the usual two-dimensional diagrams to these these three-dimensional interactions and then to the multi-dimensional complexity when correlated within the necessary plates of an internal tetrahedron or octahedron.

Here we open the very nature of chemical bonding to new possibilities. The bonding (the function) is interior to a pure structure (the form).

It is simple complexity.  If you were to keep going deeper within each octahedron and tetrahedron, as you might guess, the number of cells or objects expands quickly. By the tenth step within, there are 131,323,456 tetrahedrons and 10,730,656 octahedrons for a total of 142 million objects.

At the eleventh step there are over a billion tetrahedrons and 63,859,648 octahedrons within.  The total, just taking 11 steps within, are 1,110,412,992 objects.

At the twelfth step there are over 8 billion tetrahedrons and 381 million octahedrons. That level of complexity within such simplicity allows for a wide range of diversity.

It has now been reduced to first principles.

A footnote and timeline:  Yes, this particular document was written in May 2007.  The first iterations that lead up to this document were written in 1994.

The precursor to it all was that display project pictured in the top right.  That was simply called, “A Display Project of First Principles.” It began as a list of some of the most-speculative, integrative thinkers within the major academic disciplines.

I wanted to invite them to a conference in July 1979 at MIT for the World Council of Churches.  Over 4000 people would gather to discuss, Faith, Science, and the Future.  Being on the organizing committee, it seemed to me that the ideas of the finest scholars from the area, and then from the world, should be part of that discussion.

At that time, those leading scholars were not invited.  The committee thought they would dominate and possibly overwhelm the discussions; so as a consolation, they allowed me to organize this display project.

The display project was titled What is Life? after Erwin Schrödinger’s book of the same title.  This work is being renewed.  Early stages of it can be found on other pages within this website.  BEC