Arieh Ben-Naim was a chemistry professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 2002. He has subsequently taught at Stockholm University, Indiana University, Heidelberg University, University of California San Diego, and at least a dozen other universities around the world.

Homepage(s): HUJ, LinkedIN, ResearchGate, Springer, Twitter, Wikipedia (born in 1934)

• Entropy & Information Theory: Uses and Misuses, Arieh Ben-Naim;  Entropy (Basel). 2019 Dec; 21(12): 1170 • Can entropy be defined for, and the Second Law applied to living systems?

First email: 30-31 March 2023  

Dear Prof. Dr. Arieh Ben-Naim:

I have a coterie of senior scholars who I’ve respected over the years; among them are Gerald Holton (98), Peter Higgs (92), Steve Smale (92), Antonino Zichichi (92). Your Wikipedia page is a good read, but compared to these friends mentioned, you are just coming into your prime!

But still, I am adding your name to their list!

Early in life I got tired of being on the outside of the equation; it was more fun being in where the action was. In 2011 with a bunch of high schoolers in geometry class, we climbed down inside the tetrahedron and its octahedron, dividing the edges by 2, connecting those new vertices and going smaller and smaller. Zeno was our Pied Piper. In 45 steps, we were observing fermions and in another 67 steps we were facing the Planck Wall and the Planck base units. 

We also multiplied by 2; in just 90 steps we were on the edges of the universe watching the expansion.  202 notations for everything, everywhere, for all time, yet in this outline, all the notations were always active.  

We were strangers in a strange-but-wonderful land! https://81018.com/home/ We made charts! https://81018.com/chart/ is our working chart. We made a STEM tool: https://81018.com/stem/ Yet, our nascent model kept telling us, “I’m much more; keep working at it.” Today’s summary page is here: https://81018.com/continuity-symmetry-harmony/

I hope you enjoy our idiosyncratic ways; and if we are terribly mistaken, please advise us if there is a way back to the straight-and-narrow. I suspect not!

To find you this morning and read your work is a lift. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Warmly,

Bruce

PS. What we did in 2011 was to redefine our framework of applicability.

We outlined the universe from the smallest to the largest with base-2 notation. “Straightforward and simple, but so what?” we declared, then asked further, “Well, we have a geometry with it, we have the Planck base units, what more do we need?”

The initial answer was, “We’ve got it all, everything-everywhere-for-all-time. But, how did it come to be?” Our first guess was as a STEM model: https://81018.com/stem/

That was very satisfying until we pondered Aristotle’s mistake.  Then we found a heretofore unnoticed five-octahedral gap and did some gap analysis.

So, we are stumbling along based on what we find. Our biggest advisor is the quietness of scholars who do not respond!

I hope this clarifies who we are, how we came to this point, and what we hope to do! -BEC

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