Born: March 29, 1928 – Died: May 9, 2025
TO: John Stachel, Boston University, Boston, MA
FM: Bruce E. Camber
RE: Your ArXiv articles, especially the 2006 article with Mihaela Iftime, The hole argument for covariant theories, General Relativity and Gravitation, 38: 1241–1252; another with Kaća Bradonjic (CV), Quantum gravity: Meaning and measurement, Volume 46, Part B, May 2014, Pages 209-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2013.12.002; and even your homepage(s), CV, being the first editor of the Einstein Papers Project, inSPIREHEP, other publications, X (tweet) reference, Wikipedia, and YouTube: You Must Remember This (October 22, 2010).
This page: https://81018.com/stachel/
First email in a very long time: 28 June 2022
Dear Dr. Prof. John Stachel:
You are obviously doing something right. My only regret is that I didn’t take an abundance of courses with you. Cohen and Shimony were OK, but where is their legacy now?
Always the odd-duck out, I got my start at BU within the colloquiums. We certainly were in close proximity on many occasions… breathing the same air. I was the one touting “…perfected-states in space-time” and other such delightful nonsense.
I dropped out while studying in Paris with JP Vigier and Costa de Beauregard. Colleagues called me home; our little company that we started in 1971 (pre-BU), was finally making money. Within a year we had over 100 employees and were selling software around the world.
I came back to it all in 2011 and in 2016 consolidated my thoughts within a little website — https://81018.com/ — that is becoming increasingly well-visited. Today, I’ll start a new page — https://81018.com/stachel — to focus on your work and the hole argument. You will not be immediately pleased but I’ll work on it until it is right! It always takes me a little longer.
By the way, were you aware of Aristotle’s mistake that was touted as truth for 1800 years? He tried tiling and tessellating the universe with tetrahedrons. It’s possible but only well-outside the context within which he was thinking. With geometries still making a comeback, I think it is noteworthy.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Bruce
Follow-up: Gennadi Sardanashvily, Vincent Moncrief, Norma Chase, Abhay Ashtekar and
Oliver Pooley. Also: Kaća Bradonjić