I met with John Bell at CERN labs back in 1974 and 1977.

A little background history of the early years

by Bruce E. Camber

I first visited John Bell at CERN labs in 1974 and then again in 1977. Though my vision of perfected states in spacetime emerged in 1971 as a result of first thinking about the EPR paradox and Bell’s inequality equations, it wouldn’t be until 2011 that I began to rethink perfected states in light of the 202 base-2 notations from the Planck base units to the current time. And, it wasn’t until 2016, that I began to associate perfected states with pi(π). Without a mathematical container for our universe, we get stuck inside our worldviews. Even with the most embracing Weltanschauung, without those first 64 notations, it is still not large enough.

The first second brings us into Notation-143; the first billionth of a second, known as the nanosecond, only brings us into Notation-114. Even a billionth of a billionth of a second, the attosecond, is too slow at Notation-84. The zeptosecond is within Notation-74. And at the current limits of measurement, the yoctosecond, is within Notation-64. The “Plancksecond” also known as PlanckTime, is another 64 notations smaller. Here begins the domains of perfection. Too fast, too small, there is not enough time for any imperfections. Imperfections take time. Of course, the calculations for the Planck base units are with dimensionless constants and Einstein and Planck with their claque of other Nobel laureates could easily have opened this domain long before quantum physics became dominant.

Again, my original formulation was quite basic.

In 1975 I got an opportunity to chat with MIT’s Victor (Viki) Weisskopf about my peculiar formulation and how time and space emerged as a result. Without the simple mathematics, it was what I called “feel-good” talk. It had no formulations per se and though it had helped to open doors at Boston University in 1972, as a formulation, it progressed rather slowly. Perhaps things would have been different if I had accepted an invitation to study with the MIT combinatorics group with Gian-Carlo Rota. First, I was intimidated; and also, I was profoundly grateful for all the help Boston University had extended to me, so it is only recently that I begun to pursue Rota’s lines of thinking. Victor Weisskopf and Boston University professor, Lew Kowarski, helped to arrange my second visit with John Bell in 1977. Though I had stopped for a few days in London to join David Bohm (wiki) and his doctoral candidates in a day-long discussion about points, lines, and the tetrahedron, it would be well after Bohm died (October 1992), that I asked the question, “What is perfectly enclosed within the tetrahedron?” I had earlier seen answers to that question, alluded to by Arthur L. Loeb and his collaborator, R. Buckminster Fuller (Synergetics I). I was in their small group called the Philomorphs who met in the attic of Harvard’s Sever Hall. But those were weak references, not considered too important.

In 1994, for me, it was a major awakening.

There were others who laid the foundations for that awakening. One of my Boston University professors was Abner Shimony. He didn’t quite know what to do with my continuity-symmetry-harmony defining a spacetime moment and a moment of perfection, but he was one of the key voices declaring how important Bell’s work was in our quest to understand the very nature of reality. He helped to keep me focused.

After that second meeting with John Bell, my reading was attenuated to anybody who was working in the area. Having failed my first pass at the French exam, I decided to take up an offer of a friend in Paris to continue my work in the hometown of Olivier Costa de Beauregard and Jean-Pierre Vigier. Both had deep roots in quantum physics through their doctoral work with Louis de Broglie. They were lovely people who were diametrically opposed to each others work. So, it was a bit awkward to work one day per week with one at the Institut Henri Poincaire and the next day with the other.

Vigier arranged a day at the optics lab in d’Orsay with Alain Aspect. He also had invited the distinguished Bernard d’Espagnat to join us.

It was a most special time; nobody was seeing a path out of the deep and dark. Nobody was examining the dance of pi, phi, Euler’s number, and the square root of 2.

Thank you. -BEC

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