Getting people’s attention is not easy.

An online page returned this greeting “Hello! Why are you contacting us today?”

My answer: I want to pitch a story.

Their response: “Please summarize your pitch suggestions in one sentence.”

My answer: Newton’s absolute space and time misled Stephen Hawking and much of science; and, although we’ve known it’s wrong — Einstein told us — we are not discussing alternatives (we know those multiverses won’t do) even though we need more simple alternatives before, as a culture and a people, we become more unhinged.

Explain your pitch suggestion in detail:
Since 1687 we have increasingly adopted Isaac Newton’s absolute space and time, even after Einstein convinced us all that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Nobody much understood that formula, but it was fun to feel important and the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pretty well proved he was right, but still something was wrong.

Nobody could understand it.

So, for our commonsense view of the world, we reverted back to Newton and absolute space and time. That’s not right but the best any of our best scholars could do was to suggest various flavors of multiverse in 10-or-11 dimensions. That didn’t help much, so we continued with Newton’s commonsense which we know is not right, but we have to have some structure for our beliefs, don’t we?

OK, now, in 2011 a group out of a New Orleans high school was playing with Plato’s basic structures; you know, the tetrahedron is the simple one. They happened to look inside. By dividing each of its six edges by 2, connecting the new vertices, they discovered four half-sized tetrahedrons in each corner and a big old octahedron in the middle. Doing the same division by 2, they discovered half-sized octahedrons in each of its six corners and eight tetrahedrons, one in each face, all sharing a common center point.

Wow, now, that’s exciting; they found a possibility for an infinite regression. Wrong.

Enter Max Planck, one of Einstein’s early mentors, a Nobel laureate in 1918 and the founder of quantum theory. He also established some endpoints for space and time. Called Planck Length and Planck Time, these rather brilliant calculations were ignored until another Nobel laureate (Frank Wilczek) came along in 2001 and wrote a few articles about the place and importance of those numbers.

Very cool.

BUT, our friend Stephen Hawking and his sidekick, Alan Guth, had pretty well convinced everybody that their hot big bang cosmology was right. They were very strident about it and had recruited many followers who would die defending their concepts. Billions had been invested. Television shows were made and became among the highest rated in their day. You’d be crazy to take on the big bang.

But, these kids and their teachers didn’t know much about cosmology.

They just followed those tetrahedrons and octahedrons, going further and further within. Dividing by 2, in just 47 steps within, they were at the scale used by the most-distinguished CERN labs in Geneva. In another 67 steps within they were in Planck’s back pocket. They had arrived at the Planck scale. Standing right next to Planck Time and Planck Length, they were surprised to discover that nobody had been down there in a long time; and those who had, really didn’t leave too many traces. It looked like a cover-up job.

The kids had to retreat to give it all some careful thought. Back up in the classroom, the idea was proposed to multiply by 2 given that dividing by 2 was so fascinating. Now, you won’t believe this — it is most upsetting — but in just 90 steps, 90 times multiplying each step by 2, we were out at the edge of the expanding universe and the current age of the universe. We had started at the very beginning — a very fine place to start — and we had come to current edge and current expansion of the universe.

Can you believe it? Really too cool for words. Add the two figures together and you get 202 doublings from the smallest to the largest measurements of space and time.

Doesn’t that just take your breath away?

That was 2011. So we have a bunch of numbers, neatly ordered, but we had our share of doubters and troublemakers among us. One of them snarlingly asked, “So what do you do with it, dude?” It took us a few years to begin to figure it out, and then a year to find some doubling mechanisms, but we are well on the road. It is definitely an alternative theory and instead of many multiple dimensions, we have the standard, rather-boring four dimensions and a fourth grade version of multiplying by 2. That is, what is 2 to the 64th power (to get up and around the CERN level of measurement) and what is 2 to the 202nd power? Those are the sweetest questions a fourth grader would love to know the answers to impress their family and friends.

There is plenty of writing already done about all this stuff:
http://81018.com
https://81018.com/home/ The early story
https://81018.com/tot/ for some of the geometries
https://81018.com/chart/ for all the numbers
https://81018.com/structure/ for more Planck-Einstein stuff
and dozens of pages like these:
https://81018.com/beyond/
https://81018.com/believed/
https://81018.com/nature/

It is an alternative and we think it is worthy of people’s time to explore it further! What do you think?  Thanks.

Warmly,
Bruce