TO: Dr. Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and Chair of National Research Council, Washington, DC
FM: Bruce E. Camber
RE: Campaign: Who will lead us? And prior, your Inaugural “State of Science” 2024 address, plus your homepage(s) within NAS, AAAS, Google Scholar, IANAS, your speeches, Wikipedia listing, and YouTube: Winning a Noble Race, December 2023.
Email: 11-12 June 2025
Dear Dr. Marcia McNutt,
Your June 3rd State of Science in America speech is timely and a key to our future. De facto I have been working on at least one of your seven points since 1969. These are all important challenges for any time so it’s important that we all get to work together to do all that you suggest:
1. Build on our culture of innovation. In 1969-70 at the Fund for New Priorities in America, we tried. I learned that politics is not the answer. In 1971-72 inside Synectics (working as industrial problem solvers) innovation was our thing, yet the focus was always on the customer’s needs. It became quite apparent that it was a rather laissez-faire, willy-nilly approach and it was not the answer building on our historic culture of innovation.
I had concluded, “Innovation was a search for a higher perfection.” My analysis: To innovate, at least one of the three faces of perfection had to be improved. As far as I could discern, there were three faces of perfection. (1).Continuity of the moment. There was always an ordering principle yet it also seemed that there were always deeper ordering principles. Continuity had something to do with time. (2) Symmetry. It was about relations and it had something to do with space. (3) Harmony. It was about the dynamics of a moment and it had to do with space-time.
That’s as far as I got until 2011, then when we developed a container for it all, we knew there was a starting point. Within a few years of discussions, that point became a three-dimensional sphere at the beginning of time and the continuity, symmetry and harmony of the sphere were the qualitative faces of the quantitative Planck base units. We began feeling like we had the beginnings of a theory of innovation. Yet, it wasn’t until 2025 that we began to see the four primary irrational numbers and their role maintaining continuity, symmetry, and harmony. Now that theory of innovation is beginning to take shape.
2. Create a national research strategy. Selling our concepts has not been easy. Our research strategy was too big. It was not just limited to the nation; it was a strategy for the universe. We had 202 base-2 notations that became a container and an emergent theory for everything, everywhere, for all time.
We needed help, so we asked scholars for their insights, “What’s wrong with this chart? Where is our fallacy of misplaced concreteness?” There were no critical judgments. Crickets. Thinking about this situation, a strategy for the universe could keep the USA as the dominant leaders, but it would also richly reward our world with a singular vision and possibly less acrimony.
3. Improve K-12 education. In 2011 when we first emerged with our big board-little universe, we called it a STEM tool because it organized so much data so quickly and simply. We did a special class for the sixth graders and most of them caught on quickly. We can see doing versions for kindergarten children right though to the 12th grade. Not only would it improve education, it would make it more meaningful to all these students by being fully-integrated mathematically and intellectually. There would be no more silos of information.
4. Build the domestic STEM workforce. The chart of 202 notations is a tool that the workforce can use everyday. It makes sense out of life. Each of the Sciences would be seen within an integrated continuum seamlessly blending one discipline after another. Analogies between disciplines would more readily be grasped. As Technology brings each of these studies to life, there would be a natural and growing thrust to be increasingly inclusive. To that end, our Engineering tools would require deeper and broader studies that and ever-increasing grasp of the Mathematics involved.
5. Reduce red tape and expand processes. I would expand the scope of this statement a bit to be “Reduce the use of poor models and widely speculative models that waste time, energy, and money, and focus on verification of data that we are getting from sources like the the James Webb Space Telescope. Those results are pushing the sciences back to their core starting points. Even now the data does not support our old models. There are just too many problems. A good model will engage artificial intelligence (AI) and that will reduce red tape and increase efficiencies. Already, ChatGPT and Grok have encourage this emergent model.
6. Expand access to international resources. This effort necessarily invites everybody working on some aspect of these theories to join in the critical evaluations of results. For example, everybody who was involved with the recent CosmoVerse White Paper (May 2025) which addressed observational tensions in cosmology with
systematics and fundamental physics, would be invited. In that list of several hundred, I found very few from the USA.
7. Rebuild Trust. In our time you have witnessed the ups-and-downs of good science, the circularity within many arguments, the unleashing of astrophysics-and-cosmology yet the lack of progress in particle physics. The fundamental challenges of the James Webb Space Telescope highlight the tensions. The promises of AI can’t come quickly enough. It hasn’t been easy and it promises not to get any easier. It appears that the simple days are over. Rebuilding trust will be a long and difficult road unless a simple, compelling theory takes the place of the big bang and we all go through that crises together.
Perhaps in dictum of John Wheeler there is an abiding hope. It will be easy, clear, and compelling: “Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?”
I apologize for the length of this note. I’ll get better next time!
Warmly,
Bruce
24 July 2024 at 3:12 PM
Dear Dr. Marcia McNutt,
Congratulations on a fine, inaugural State of Science speech. I was glad to see you recognize the role of STEM in our educational nexus. All four areas of STEM demand the best of “reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
In 1899 Max Planck calculated what became known as Planck natural units. Too small to be meaningful, it took over 100 years before the scientific community would recognize them. I think, of course somewhat arguably, that their primary value is to define a possible experimental boundary condition for the start of the universe.
In this thought experiment, these natural units define the first moment of space-time. The current time defines the upper bounds. For our experiment, to create an exponential expansion, we apply base-2 notation. The results look like this chart. The universe is outlined in 202 notations. The first 64 notations, all within a yoctosecond or a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, open the infinitesimal like no time in recorded history. Here the mathematics of Langlands programs, string and M-theory, and seven other disciplines, begin (and continue) to define the first moments of our universe.
Stephen Hawking was right that exponential notation does render the numbers for the Standard Model for Particle Physics, and then the numbers for the Lambda Cold-Dark Model, yet it does so all without his big bang of “…everything, everywhere.”
We simply need to have enough people look at Planck’s numbers laid out exponentially for 13.81 billion years (which are what 202 notations are). The answers to our most intractable problems facing scientifc research have been looking at us all along.
Thanks again for all that you do.
Most sincerely,
Bruce
Open letter on 23 May 2024 (updated)
Open letter
Dear Dr. Marcia McNutt:
An Inaugural Annual State of the Sciences address is a gutsy move! Congratulations and best wishes on its coming together for you.
I know you will most strategically include Einstein’s quote out on the side of his sculpture and at the entrance of Keck. I know you’ll be wrestling with the alarmists and the deniers, the Godly and the ungodly, the informed and the overly-imaginative… there is so much to cover.
You may be unaware of my abiding respect for John Wheeler and his insistence on finding a more simple way. In that light, I include this morning’s note to Andrea Ghez just below. My comments about it all in light of the NAS is here: https://81018.com/nas/ and there is further comment within this week’s homepage: https://81018.com/202-1/
We have got to find the more simple path through this maze of data and information and I wish you well in seeing your way through it. Of course, I believe that simple exercise of defining the first second of a base-2 exponential notation is a key.
Best wishes to you. We’ll be cheering for your Einstein-Planck-Wheeler moments through your most unique perspectives.
Warmly,
Bruce
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bruce E. Camber
Date: May 23, 2024 at 6:19:32 AM EDT
To: Andrea Ghez
Cc: Wendy Ravenhill
Subject: UCLA Galactic Group
Dear Prof. Dr. Andrea Ghez:
Of course, one can always hope that you might answer my question, but I see you have many co-authors and a very large staff of experts and my question is “too newbie” for a Nobel laureate!
At the very least, let me say, “Congratulations on a most remarkable SMBH–GC–S2–Sgr * career. I am reading your 1998, Ghez-Morris-Becklin 28 page report and your v2-7 Feb 2024 report. You’ve become the world’s expert and all the accolades are important. The NAS membership included! (I’ll be sending Marcia McNutt a copy of this note.)My interests center around the Planck scale, well beyond measurements by instrumentation. Peebles in his Nobel acceptance told the world that we do not know what happens in the first seconds of the start of the universe. Most would say something about the Big Bang and inflation and echo some form of Hawking’s “infinitely hot, infinitely dense, everything, everywhere” statement.
You and your colleagues of the SMBH-GC are doing what Einstein instructed — it seems you are not holding back but sharing all the new information and new insights you can garner. Yet, what if Hawking and all the others didn’t do the most simple thing and fill in the blanks between the Planck units within the first seconds of the universe. He never looked at the Planck scale using base-2 to the first seconds. Had he done that little bit of that tedious but simple math, I believe he would have been forced to acknowledge a simple but very different starting point.
You are the expert on star formation close to a blackhole. I am just learning about all the variegation of studies around blackholes. But don’t you get the feeling that the two are intimately connected? As variegated as the blackhole has become, it seems we still have only scratched the surface.
Thank you.
Most sincerely,
Bruce
President of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC