Gell-Mann Meets Bosch . . .
At Hiroshima . . .
* The Bosch cuboctahedron is from an exhibition at Napoli in 2021.
See also, from that exhibition's starting date,
the Log24 post Desperately Seeking Symmetry.
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
Gell-Mann Meets Bosch* at Hiroshima
Comments Off on Gell-Mann Meets Bosch* at Hiroshima
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Notes on a Friday the 13th Death
A passage accessed via the new URL Starbrick.art* —
Thursday, February 25, 2021
|
A related cultural note suggested by the New York Times obituary today
of fashion designer Mary McFadden, who reportedly died yesterday
(a Friday the Thirteenth) and is described by the Times as a late-life
partner of "eightfold-way" physicist Murray Gell-Mann —
* A reference to the 2-column 4-row matrix (a "brick") that underlies
the patterns in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis. The only
connection of this eight-part matrix to Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way"
that I know of is simply the number 8 itself.
Comments Off on Notes on a Friday the 13th Death
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
The Santa Fe Institute as Magisterium Wannabe
"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship
Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —
"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."
A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
COIN
RING
"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
KEY
"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."
— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —
Comments Off on The Santa Fe Institute as Magisterium Wannabe
Monday, September 16, 2019
Emergence
"Elementary particles are the most fundamental building blocks
of nature, and their study would seem to be an expression of
simplification in its purest form. The essence of complexity
research, by contrast, is the emergence of new kinds of order
that are only manifest when systems are large and messy."
— Sean Carroll in an opinion piece that concludes as follows:
The above plug for Sean Carroll's book
The Big Picture : On the Origins of
Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself suggests…
Comments Off on Emergence
Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Reality Blocks
The new Log24 tag "Eightfold Metaphysics" used in the previous post
suggests a review of posts that were tagged "The Reality Blocks" on May 24.
Then there is, of course, the May 24 death of Murray Gell-Mann, who
hijacked from Buddhism the phrase "eightfold way."
See Gell-Mann in this journal and May 24, 2003.
Comments Off on The Reality Blocks
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
“Simplification in Its Purest Form”
For students of the Hogwash School of Witchcraft and Wizardry —
"Elementary particles are the most fundamental
building blocks of nature, and their study
would seem to be an expression of simplification
in its purest form."
— Sean Carroll in The New York Times today
in an opinion piece titled "The Physicist Who
Made Sense of the Universe"
Related remarks: See a Log24 search for "Simpli…".
Comments Off on “Simplification in Its Purest Form”
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Burning Bright
Compare and contrast with . . .
The Brightburn Logo:
Related material from the May 12 post
"The Collective Unconscious
in a Cartoon Graveyard" —
|
"When they all finally reach their destination — " When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney movie Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world that exists in an alternative dimension, Nichols sighed. 'I was a little bummed, I guess,' he said of when he first learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast. Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that we're all dabbling in, sometimes you're not the first one out of the gate.' " |
Comments Off on Burning Bright
Friday, May 24, 2019
Mystery at Santa Fe
A mysterious Google Search result from this evening —
A check of Marshall's announcement reveals an apparent
contradiction to the reported May 24 date of death. Although the
announcement says that Gell-Mann died on May 24, the announcement
itself is timestamped midnight (00:00) at the beginning of May 24
according to Greenwich Mean Time, i.e., at 6 pm May 23 in Santa Fe —
This may or may not help to illustrate the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Comments Off on Mystery at Santa Fe
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Bright Star
See instances of the title in this journal.
Material related to yesterday evening's post
"Bright and Dark at Christmas" —
The Buddha of Rochester:
See also the Gelman (i.e., Gell-Mann) Prize
in the film "Dark Matter" and the word "Eightfold"
in this journal.
" A fanciful mark is a mark which is invented
for the sole purpose of functioning as a trademark,
e.g., 'Kodak.' "
"… don't take my Kodachrome away." — Paul Simon
Comments Off on Bright Star
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
In Memoriam…
… industrial designer Kenji Ekuan —
The adjective "eightfold," intrinsic to Buddhist
thought, was hijacked by Gell-Mann and later
by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
(MSRI, pronounced "misery"). The adjective's
application to a 2x2x2 cube consisting of eight
subcubes, "the eightfold cube," is not intended to
have either Buddhist or Semitic overtones.
It is pure mathematics.
Comments Off on In Memoriam…
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Lie Groups for Holy Week
Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics, by Bruce A. Schumm, Johns Hopkins University Press, hardcover, Oct. 20, 2004, pp. 94-95–
"In the early 1960s, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology by the name of Murray Gell-Mann interpreted the patterns observed in the emerging array of elementary particles as being due to a symmetry….
Gell-Mann's eightfold way was perhaps the first conscious application of the results of the pure mathematical field of group theory and, in particular, the theory of 'Lie groups,' to a problem in physics."
From the preface–
"I didn't come up with the title for this book. For that, I can thank the people at the Johns Hopkins University Press…. my only reservation about the title is that… it implies a degree of literacy to which I can't lay claim."
Amen.
Remedial reading for those who might have fallen for Schumm's damned nonsense–
"Quantum Mechanics and Group Theory I," by Dallas C. Kennedy
Comments Off on Lie Groups for Holy Week