This page: https://81018.com/2020/01/27/cole/

First-known email: 3 December 2025 

Dear KC:

Envious, just to hang out for a couple of months at IAS, and to have a page on their site (and the USC site), and to get cited, about your “real and imagined boundaries, limits, and horizons,” to wit, Frank Oppenheimer would approve.

Congratulations. It’s as good as it gets.

But it’s not over. Our most important work is ahead of us.

With the confluence of AI and satellite observatories like JWST, our deeply conflicted sciences should be making everyone a little anxious, perhaps dizzy, and a bit nervous. So deeply conflicted, everybody should be wondering, “What is fundamental?”

I am wrestling with gauge principles. The construction of the Standard Model was guided by the gauge principle that all fundamental forces exist to maintain local symmetries suggesting a deep connection between symmetry and the structure of nature.

Might you comment? https://81018.com/

Thanks.

Warm regards,

Bruce

PS. My Exploratorium story: https://81018.com/exploratorium/

PS. Within an email that was never sent, I copied a listing of this board of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The CSI Executive Council editor was Kendrick Frazier. I have known and worked with everyone listed but you!

• Mario Bunge, philosopher, McGill Univ., Montreal
• Sean B. Carroll, molecular geneticist; vice president for science education, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Madison, WI
• K.C. Cole, science writer; author; professor, Univ. of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism
• Richard Dawkins, zoologist, Oxford Univ
• Daniel C. Dennett, Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts Univ.
• Murray Gell-Mann, professor of physics, Santa Fe Institute; Nobel laureate
• Douglas R. Hofstadter, professor of human understanding and cognitive science, Indiana Univ.
• Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and professor of history of science, Harvard Univ.
• Lawrence M. Krauss, foundation professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Dept.; director, Origins Initiative, Arizona State Univ.
• Marvin Minsky, professor of media arts and sciences, M.I.T.
• Bill Nye, science educator and television host, Nye Labs
• Clifford A. Pickover, scientist, author, editor, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
• Massimo Pigliucci, professor of philosophy, City Univ. of New York–Lehman College
• Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, Harvard Univ
• Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director, Hayden Planetarium, New York City
• Marilyn vos Savant, Parade magazine contributing editor
• Steven Weinberg, professor of physics and astronomy, Univ. of Texas at Austin; Nobel laureate
• E.O. Wilson, Univ. professor emeritus, organismic and evolutionary biology, Harvard Univ.