Greg Ip
Chief Economics Commentator
The Wall Street Journal
Washington, D.C. and NYC
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First email: Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 9:56 PM
Dear Greg:
I could see you struggling to pull that article together so you could “do a wrap” perhaps with pretty packaging and a bow on the top which goes right to the problem you cite in your headline: Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas (Dec. 20, 2016) which is succinctly summarized in the second paragraph: None of this has translated into meaningful advances in Americans’ standard of living.” You go on to say, “The low-hanging fruit in science, medicine and technology has been harvested and new advances are costlier, more complex and more prone to failure. Innovation comes through trial and error, but society has grown less tolerant of risk.”
We are so preconditioned within our culture and indeed within this civilization, to think collectively. Individualism, debate, idiosyncratic constructions are difficult to sustain. And, it may all come down to our worldviews. They’re all too small.
I believe that we need to transition to highly-integrated universe views, then begin to open those up for debate and discussion and experimentation. Paradigmatic shifts larger than the Internet might just begin to happen.
To date, there are only two such views, all done by children. The first was in 1957 with Kees Boeke and his base-10 view of the universe, Cosmic View, The Universe in 40 Jumps. Mostly eye candy, the Huang twins carry on Boeke’s work. Gerard t‘Hooft and Stefan Vandoren extended it with their 2014 book, Time in Powers of Ten: Natural Phenomena and Their Timescales.
The second universe view was more complete. It started in a high school geometry class in New Orleans back in December 2011. We had the measurements of the Hubble space telescope, plus all the new open questions within cosmology, and the 40 years of scholarship that has attempted to justify the big bang theory.
The reason we are hitting the wall is that we do not have a container large enough to properly context all of that new intellectual property so its best applications just pop out. The base-2 model contexts everything, everywhere throughout all time. That’s rather large enough!
I so enjoyed reading your article this morning. Thank you.
Most sincerely,
Bruce
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Bruce Camber
Center for Perfection Studies
http://81018.com
PS. I know hundreds of cosmologist and thousands of physicists who would disagree with the line after the statement about Robert Wilson, the Nobel laureate. He may have confirmed a small part of the big bang theory. He surely did not fully and profoundly confirm the theory; it is still theory qua theory. -B