Is Fantastic Quaternions: The Answer To Life The Universe And Everything

franks (64)in #science • 6 years ago

After the last week with Politicians Bending Space Light and Time plus any Words recorded on Video.

It was refreshing to read about:
Fantastic Quaternions and the search for: The Answer To Life The Universe And Everything.

And an amazing Mixed Martial Arts Expert Cohl Furey.
A mathematical physicist at the University of Cambridge, finding links between the Standard Model of particle physics and the octonions, numbers whose multiplication rules are encoded in a triangular diagram called the Fano plane.

With my present view of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, having caused a split in our Timeline.
Releasing Monsters From the ID and leaving us suffering under a bunch of Crazy Delusionional Western Leaders.

(Monsters From the Id - The Climax of Forbidden Planet - 1956)

This Fantastic Quaternions option, looks like we can just switch the fucking thing off, and use a pen and paper to crack the secrets of the Universe.

(Cohl Furey on the Octonions and Particle Physics)

Sounding and looking like the lead singer in a Punk Band, called, The Octonions,
Cohl Furey, has a GUT feeling the octonions connect up to and complete:
The Grand Unified Theory

Read On: The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature.
By Natalie Wolchover

"After breaks from school spent ski-bumming, bartending abroad and intensely training as a mixed martial artist, Furey later met the division algebras again in an advanced geometry course and learned just how peculiar they become in four strokes.
When you double the dimensions with each step as you go from real numbers to complex numbers to quaternions to octonions, she explained, “in every step you lose a property.”
Real numbers can be ordered from smallest to largest, for instance,
“whereas in the complex plane there’s no such concept.”

Next, quaternions lose commutativity; for them, a × b doesn’t equal b × a.
This makes sense, since multiplying higher-dimensional numbers involves rotation, and when you switch the order of rotations in more than two dimensions you end up in a different place.
Much more bizarrely, the octonions are nonassociative, meaning (a × b) × c doesn’t equal a × (b × c). “Nonassociative things are strongly disliked by mathematicians,” said John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, and a leading expert on the octonions.
“Because while it’s very easy to imagine noncommutative situations — putting on shoes then socks is different from socks then shoes — it’s very difficult to think of a nonassociative situation.”
If, instead of putting on socks then shoes, you first put your socks into your shoes, technically you should still then be able to put your feet into both and get the same result.
“The parentheses feel artificial.”

The octonions’ seemingly unphysical nonassociativity has crippled many physicists’ efforts to exploit them,
but Baez explained that their peculiar math has also always been their chief allure.
Nature, with its four forces batting around a few dozen particles and anti-particles, is itself peculiar.
The Standard Model is “quirky and idiosyncratic,” he said.

The Dixon Algebra
To reconstruct particle physics, Furey uses the product of the four division algebras,
R⊗C⊗H⊗O (R for reals, C for complex numbers,
H for quaternions and O for octonions) — sometimes called the Dixon algebra,
after Geoffrey Dixon, a physicist who first took this tack in the 1970s and ’80s before failing to get a faculty job and leaving the field.
(Dixon forwarded me a passage from his memoirs:
“What I had was an out-of-control intuition that these algebras were key to understanding particle physics, and I was willing to follow this intuition off a cliff if need be. Some might say I did.”)