"But Furey didn’t — couldn’t — give up. Driven by a profound intuition that the octonions and other division algebras underlie nature’s laws, she told a colleague that if she didn’t find work in academia she planned to take her accordion to New Orleans and busk on the streets to support her physics habit. "
That was nice. However all these physicists mentioned in the article (an I personally know several of them) are aiming at the Standard Model and "elementary particles" - high energy physics. I am rather interested in low energy physics: gravity, information and consciousness. That is the road less traveled.
I take your point completely. The Standard Model is so entrenched amongst today's physicists that it goes completely against the grain for them to disassociate themselves from it. Indeed, the article mentions that "
Furey has yet to construct a simple octonionic model of all Standard Model particles and forces in one go, and she hasn’t touched on gravity". Without including gravity, she will not be able to come up with a workable UFT. However, I am struck by the fact that the article says she is "
Driven by a profound intuition that the octonions and other division algebras underlie nature’s laws". Where does that intuition come from I wonder?
Robert Graves in
The White Goddess explained such intuition in terms of proleptic and analeptic thought and used Clerk Maxwell as a case in question where he pointed out that the great father of electromagnetic theory could come up with the correct formula but then relied on colleagues to justify the result by pedestrian calculation, what today I guess we would call number crunching.
I am no physicist or mathematician but one other thing which caught my attention was where the article states that: "
Whereas Dixon and others proceeded by mixing the division algebras with extra mathematical machinery, Furey restricts herself; in her scheme, the algebras “act on themselves.” Combined as R⊗C⊗H⊗O, the four number systems form a 64-dimensional abstract space." Is it just coincidence but I Ching, the earliest known divination tool, uses 64 hexagrams to represent the archetypal situations of human life and there are 64 codons in the DNA genetic code. Indeed, there are also 64 squares on a chess board.
Talking about chess, the game of chess forms much of the structure of Lewis carroll's book
Alice Through the Looking Glass (see:
The 64-Square Grid Design of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ on this theme). I only mention this because the C's seemed to make a cryptic reference to that book in the
session dated 18 July 1998 when they said:
“A: You are dancing on the 3rd density ballroom floor."Alice likes to go through the looking glass" at the Crystal Palace. Atlantean reincarnation surge brings on the urge to have a repeat performance.”
If you are not aware,
Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a brilliant Oxford University mathematican of the traditional Euclidian school who worked a number of criticisms of modern mathematical theories into his two famous stories concerning the adventures of his character Alice. See:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: An Esoteric Journey and
Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved for more on this.
Carroll was also a leading rosicrucian and allegedly a member of the
Orphic Circle and his two Alice tales contain a lot of esoteric symbolism. One of the mathematicans he apparently lined up in his sights was none other than
William Rowan Hamilton, who invented Quaternions and died in 1865, just after
Alice i
n Wonderland was published. Quoting from
Melanie Bayley's 2009 article:
The parallels between Hamilton’s maths and the Hatter’s tea party – or perhaps it should read “t-party” – are uncanny. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique he won’t let the Hatter move the clocks past six.
Reading this scene with Hamilton’s maths in mind, the members of the Hatter’s tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all-important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers.
Their movement around the table is reminiscent of Hamilton’s early attempts to calculate motion, which was limited to rotatations in a plane before he added time to the mix. Even when Alice joins the party, she can’t stop the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse shuffling round the table, because she’s not an extra-spatial unit like Time.
The Hatter’s nonsensical riddle in this scene – “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” – may more specifically target the theory of pure time. In the realm of pure time, Hamilton claimed, cause and effect are no longer linked, and the madness of the Hatter’s unanswerable question may reflect this.
Alice’s ensuing attempt to solve the riddle pokes fun at another aspect of quaternions: their multiplication is non-commutative, meaning that x × y is not the same as y × x. Alice’s answers are equally non-commutative. When the Hare tells her to “say what she means”, she replies that she does, “at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing”. “Not the same thing a bit!” says the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
It’s an idea that must have grated on a conservative mathematician like Dodgson, since non-commutative algebras contradicted the basic laws of arithmetic and opened up a strange new world of mathematics, even more abstract than that of the symbolic algebraists.
When the scene ends, the Hatter and the Hare are trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. This could be their route to freedom. If they could only lose him, they could exist independently, as a complex number with two terms. Still mad, according to Dodgson, but free from an endless rotation around the table.
I don't know if the C's were trying to draw our attention to Lewis Carroll and his works (I have written about Carroll's possible links to other famous rosicrucians of the 19th Century such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and to the trance medium, Emma Hardinge Britten, the esoteric Alice in Wonderland, elsewhere on the Forum) but the C's also made an indirect reference to Alice in Wonderland in the
Session dated June 13, 1998:
Q: (A) 1 2 3 are the first three prime numbers...
A: Yes, thank you Arkadiusz!!!! Laura is dancing around in wonderland, meanwhile all of creation, of existence, is contained in 1, 2, 3!!! Look for this when you are trying to find the keys to the hidden secrets of all existence... They dwell within. 11, 22, 33, 1/2, 1/3, 1, 2, 3, 121, 11, 111, 222, 333, and so on! Get it?!?!
Q: When you say that the secrets of all existence dwell within 1 2 3 or variations thereof, what kind of secrets are we talking about here?
A: All.
Q: Well, name two at the top of the list just so I know where we are going here?
A: You can do that!
Q: Are we talking about secrets of physics?
A: Yes.
Q: Are we talking about secrets as in encoded words?
A: Yes.
Q: Are we talking about the Fibonacci series?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) Continuous fractions?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) That means all...
A: Yes.
I may be completely wrong on all of this and the C's may have intended something altogether different when making these references to Carroll's works but I offer it as food for thought anyway. At the very least, people may now view the wonderful
Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass in a different light.
