Octonion Math in Physics

I’m not sure I understood most of it, but the ideas sure are interesting!

So, an onion with eight arms? Guess I’ll be seeing that in my nightmares.

Cohl Furey is a way cool name. That’s as far as I have gotten. Back in.

She’s a silver-eyed physics genius who does MMA and plays the accordion in her spare time. Basically a superhero.

Interesting article. Most of it went over my head, but it’s fascinating to think that the missing pieces in our understanding of physics may come, not from multi-billion-dollar colliders, but a 39-year old sitting on a yoga mat in the park with her laptop.

Yeah, I read this a few days ago and most of it is over my head.

Can’t argue there.

I got as far as the actual math and my eyes glazed over. But reading about her was fascinating. As is the basic theory which I sort of got. Great story.

I saw it over on ycombinator and came to the same conclusion - I wasn’t even remotely qualified to begin to form an opinion on the subject. Except for the thought that we sure have a long way to go if we are only on 8 and need to get up to 11 as the Psychlos already discovered.

What I can say is Cohl Furey is who I would have invented if I wanted an entity so cool they flipped over into absurdity with enough force to bounce right back to awesome. I feel like I should be poking fun at her but I can’t, she is literally too cool.

Octonions are eight-sided numbers. Once you see that, you can’t unsee the structure of the cosmos.

She belongs in an early William Gibson novel. Working with Molly maybe?

Edit: In the off chance he hadn’t already seen this I sent it to Peter Watts.

Man, I had a friend named Molly, from Chiba city. I don’t think I ever explained successfully how cool that was.

It is indeed!

Awesome, can’t wait to read his next book about Cohl Furey - Space Vampire Hunter.

Or is that Cohl Furey - Space Vampire?

DeBenedictis, Furey, Wormhole throats in R^m gravity, Class. Quant. Grav., 2005

Even without knowing what this means I am starting to build a small shrine.

1d8 sided numbers, yay.

Gonna have to take your word for it. :)

Here’s a link to the paper if you want your mind to feel inadequate :).

All I come away with is eight-sided dice. I don’t see how numbers have any sides.

0 has two sides, the inside and outside.
1 has no sides because it is a line.
2 has no sides because it is like a curvy 1.
3 has no sides.
4 has two sides if you draw it with a closed top.
5 has no sides.
6 has two sides, like 0, because of the loop.

And so on.

For this reason, we call 0, 4, and 6 bilaterions. The number 8 is a triloterion.

Octonions are numbers that have eight sides.

So this math doesn’t work with Roman numerals, only Arabic numbers? Huh.