TO: Nicolas Berggruen, Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles, California
FM: Bruce E. Camber
RE: First principles
First email: 12 September 2024
Dear Nicolas:
Our model may be simple; it is inclusive. It opens a “huge” domain, 0-to-64 notations (of a total of 202 to encapsulate the universe), all “doublings” of the Planck base units that are so infinitesimal, they can’t be reached by our measuring devices until perhaps Notation-65. The prior notations are so small it just might be the basis of a new science for systems theory and the beginning for complexity theory. It is a domain for string theory and, at the very smallest, it include Langlands programs and its most oblique and abstract mathematics.
Harmony? It’s not just a nicety. It is much more than “what singers do.” Since Fourier’s Transform, it has become one of the fundamentals of science.
Coca-cola sings, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” We can. And when we do, we’ll begin to surround everybody with fundamental beauty so there would be no wars, no taking of human life, but just unmitigated creativity, insights, and making things fascinating
On your website it says, “…seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies…. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future…”
The Berggruen philosophy and culture recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world like in 1750, Académie de Dijon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, also known as The First Discourse.
You all convene the key authors in dialogue with established scholars and thinkers at one of our global centers and publishes essays in Noema and their Chinese-language magazine, Cuiling, giving readers insight into perspectives of both East and West.
You invite essays that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Now, so much our earliest attempts to understand base-2 notation are still on the web. From 2011 to sometime in 2015, we were having fun exploring an unknown, infinitesimal universe. We wrote about it as if we were adventurers in a miniature galaxy. Yet, it was in those days that we started hearing from our recent graduates, especially those dropping in from nearby Loyola and Tulane universities, saying something like this, “Our professors do not understand our chart of 202 notations. I couldn’t explain it very well…”
Though the cat was out of the bag, it was obvious to me that I did not emphasize enough that it was just a theory and that it was out of the mainstream. More than ever, I realized that we needed to get some real validation from a real authority and that we also needed more actively to sell these concepts. Nobody is absurd to themselves, and the majority still believe that “Big Bang cosmology works.”
Yet, there has got to be a most compelling reason for anybody to change their cherished beliefs.
My modus operandi has always been to consult with the experts. Very early into this enterprise, we wrote to the greats; and surprisingly, we did hear back from Jonathan Wood of Stephen Hawking’s group and from Andrew Linde and Paul Steinhardt directly. Although being personal acquaintances with Viki Weisskopf, the person holding his endowed chair, Alan Guth, has not yet commented. One of our most enthusiastic supporters was a professor of mathematics, Xijia Wang, of Hunan Normal University. It opened the way to many other explorations of Chinese scholarship and many pages of references (there are no less than six groups of scrolled pages).
If he were alive today, I would be knocking on the door of John Wheeler’s summer cottage in Maine. Over in South Bristol, just a few inlets down from my grandmother’s proud-but-humble farm house in Bremen. My mother’s birthplace and the place that cultivated my summer dreams, Wheeler and I shared several notes and he gifted me with a copy of his “Frontiers of time.” He knew our concepts, especially our common sense notion of time, had to change.
Years of pages and profiles, 2016-2025, are on the https://81018.com website. It suffers from a deep sense of being on the right path with the insecurities of not knowing. Very early in my early days, I concurred with Alan Watts Wisdom of Insecurity and got comfortable with it. We can’t know everything and we should readily admit our limitations and the limits of knowledge so we remain open and humble.
The website address, 81018 [Infinity(8), unity(1), transformation(0), unity(1), infinity] begins to tell the story. Our challenge is to always dig into it all just a little further. I hope you find these pages and illustrations, and dozens of links to be interesting enough to explore further. Thank you.
Warmest regards,
Bruce Camber
Links to the institute and board of directors and staff
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