On following the work of Dudley R. Herschbach…

Dudley Herschbach, Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

AIP
ArXiv (9): Confirmation of Kramers-Henneberger Atoms
Books: Molecular Collisions Chem Physics, World Scientific, Nov., 2004
Homepage (Another at Harvard) TAMU
Nobel Prize
Wikipedia
YouTube: Science and the Written Word, March 2016

Second email: 2 February 2022

Dear Prof. Dr. Dudley Herschbach: 

I now have a reference page to your work: https://81018.com/herschbach/ I’ll work on it a bit more. It can be better.

Now my grandparents were part of Episcopal Theological School near Radcliffe; it’s moved down to NYC (imagine that). My dad did HVAC sheet metal work to keep Mark I cool. I did a stint while in high school with the Harvard SDS (1964). Dad and I had attended an “all-night” teach-in  at Memorial Hall that fall. Later, in 1970 I was back on campus with Arthur Loeb (and his friend Bucky Fuller) as part of his Philomorphs group. My highest and best use of time was with Arthur McGill at HDS studying Finite and Infinite by Austin Farrer. I also spent a bit of time with Steven Weinberg before he went off to join his mentor, Johnny Wheeler.

In 1979 I did a special display project at MIT and got great advice and help from Gerald Holton. There were so many others in the Harvard community. With Hilary Putnam and a handful of grad students we went to W.V.O. Quine’s home for dinner to discuss the foundations of logic. That’s still ongoing!

Let me simply send my best wishes to you and those you love.

Congratulations on all that you’ve done.

The big break through is yet to happen, however, I think we may have it outlined: https://81018.com/chart/ My guess about what it all means is here: https://81018.com

With warmest regards,

Bruce

First email:  Jun 14, 2020, 8:20 AM

RE: A simple question about starting points

Dear Prof. Dr. Dudley Herschbach:

Of course, Max Planck’s work on fundamental units of length, time, matter and energy (charge) was mostly ignored for over 100 years. And even today, the place and importance of his work is not well understood.

Ostensibly the Planck scale is heavily-laden with imagination. A simple fact demonstrates this point. Planck Length divided by Planck Time is equal to the speed of light. Even today there is no general confirmation of that fact.* Simply by dividing Planck’s numbers, 299,792,422 meters per second is rendered. That is still not part of the corpus of our scientific information.

If Planck Length and Planck Time are taken as the logical, very-first moments of space and time, our parameter set by which we engage the universe is quite different. If we were to apply a simple ordering system like base-2, we would end up with a chart of 202 notations or doublings from the  first moment of time to this very day and instant. This sweeping chart of the universe logically encompasses everything, everywhere for all time. A most significant group of numbers defines the Planck scale to the wave-particle duality (at Notation-67, perhaps with a range of plus-or-minus three notations). Those earlier notations, historically too small to matter, have never been rigorously considered. 

I could go on, but that would be foolhardy for an initial letter. It is already stretching credulity. You’ve seen the world; you have achieved beyond one’s wildest imagination, yet you know we all are a mixture of raw nerves these days because we do not understand fundamental things. 

Perhaps this is an opening to address those fundamentals in a more encompassing, qualitative manner.  

I thought and hoped that you might respond.

Thank you.

Most sincerely,

Bruce E. Camber

* It may well be in the very definition of those all-natural units based on the fundamental constants of nature, yet those numbers still result in actual numbers that were 75 years ahead of the crowd in providing an approximation of the speed of light that was within .001% uncertainty.

PS. I was born in Boston and spent many years in and around Harvard, but I was always a bit of a rascal. -BEC

The Stern-Gerlach experiment and the origin of electron spin are described in historical context. SPIN 2014 occurs on the fortieth anniversary of the first International High Energy Spin Physics Symposium at Argonne in 1974.  Richard G. Milner (MIT, LNS)

Bretislav Friedrich and Dudley Herschbach, Physics Today, p. 53, Dec. 2003

FIFTY YEARS OF SPIN: Personal reminiscences, Physics Today (American Institute of Physics) 29, page 43, June 1976, George E. Uhlenbeck

Symposium Summary, Richard G. Milner, MIT, LNS)

International Spin Physics 2014 Summary, Richard G. Milner