TO: Milette Shamir, VP, Int‘l Academic Collaboration, Tel Aviv University Israel
FM: Bruce E. Camber
RE: Incrementalism doesn’t make way for a breakthrough. Admit mistakes.
First email: 28 September 2025
Dear Prof. Dr. Milette Shamir:
We all want to be special. The elite among us are the leaders in knowing the most about their subject. They dominate their literature. They’re looked up to by their peers. Most published, they tend to get the awards. Once in a while, a leader who knows the weakness of their study, will break ranks and make their dark secrets available to the public.
In physics, Gerardus ‘t Hooft, who has received most-every award in his lifetime, tells us that physics is broken. Most inside the industry are well aware. Usually people only break rank when they have an alternative. ‘t Hooft is working on it. He advised me to try to keep everything as general as possible, so that we can get an opportunity to try to comprehend how to apply general rules. All we know today are a handful of symmetry groups and their representations (the Standard Model). The most urgent thing that we must investigate is how these symmetry groups constrain our models. Once we get some ideas about that “…we can minutely make steps, as small as possible…” to get the general picture of the model(s) we are searching for, and only then ask whether the world and universe act accordingly and respectively.
That attitude is one of the sources of our incrementalism. In these days, we need to be bold, have courage, and stick our necks out with our best guesses. Another reason for our incrementalism is that we do not learn from our mistakes and our mistakes are buried by scholars with no ideas how to go back to our foundations to re-build (instead of continuing to build on our old mistakes).
Here are my guesses and my work around our mistakes:
https://81018.com/originals/ Grok summarized: https://81018.com/original8/
I hope you find this all of interest. Your school is obviously one of the best in the world. Congratulations on all that you do.
Most sincerely,
Bruce
PS. Back in 1972 I had a special research project within the Lincoln Public School (Massachusetts) where we were using analogies and metaphors to teach the first principles of mathematics. Also, Brandeis has advised this project through the work of Matthew Headrick, Ruth Charney, and Stanley Deser. Plus, even your Tel Aviv faculty have been influential — scholars like Yakir Aharonov and Halina Abramowicz. Even Leo Corry’s work was lifted up for its emphases.
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Bruce E. Camber
http://81018.com/bec/
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