TO: Neil F. Comins, Professor of Physics, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469
FM: Bruce E. Camber
RE: On “how-to grasp the essential universe” and your book titled, Discovering the Essential Universe (2014); your arXiv writings; your homepage(s) including Physics Today, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube
This page: https://81018.com/2018/08/21/comins/
First email: 21 August 2018
Dear Prof. Dr. Neil Comins:
I was working on the title of our homepage; it’s all so overly sensitive. “What most captures the imagination within the appropriate context?” It is not an easy question to answer. Also, not being a cosmologist, physicist, or mathematician, but in love with all three, makes it even harder.
When I looked it up in Google to see who else might be grappling with the same concepts, of course, I found your book,”Discovering the Essential Universe.” Congratulations. A very serious book, by a very serious scientist. And, WH Freeman is such an excellent publisher. Sixth Edition! Very impressive.
The key question of course, “Just what makes something essential, a must-be part of our universe so it would becomethis universe?”
My answer came out of work we did in a high school in 2011 in New Orleans. It is totally idiosyncratic and naive, but it just might be on a better path than big bang cosmology. The primary difference between our application of base-2 to the four primary Planck units is just the first picosecond. That
is just the first three epochs. In our model, it is quite cool, quite dense, yet infinitesimally (not infinitely) small, of an infinitesimally short duration, and a very small charge and mass. Base-2’s natural inflation seems to take care of the rest of the Lambda-CDM epochs with just a little fudging
and fixing, but nothing on the order of the inflaton.
I thought you’d get a little laugh out of it all. And, to think our work had its origins in Bremen, Maine where I summered on the property where my mother was born and which now keeps me grounded in New England while I wander the world!
Best wishes to you and all that you do, and do altogether marvelously!
Most sincerely,
Bruce
PS. Given your work on educational strategies and misconceptions, I give you total permission to tell me to stop doing what we are doing. I do not want to mislead any students, yet all the experts just shrug their shoulders and wave it off, with no explanations and no precautions. -BEC