Log24

Thursday, October 5, 2023

For World Space Week

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:16 pm

See also https://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Dirac+skew+anticommuting.

For fans of a different sort of space . . .

See also the Wikipedia article on Bloom.

Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Quantum Dots: “The Thing and I” Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:34 pm

See as well "The Thing and I."

Thursday, April 21, 2022

For Arfken

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:34 am

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Physics for Poets

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:23 am

Excerpt from a long poem by Eliza Griswold


The square array above does not  contain Arfken's variant
labels
for ρ1, ρ2, and ρ3, although those variant labels were
included in Arfken's 1985 square array and in Arfken's 1985
list of six anticommuting sets, copied at MathWorld as above.
The omission of variant labels prevents a revised list of the
six anticommuting sets from containing more  distinct symbols
than there are matrices.

Revised list of anticommuting sets:

α1   α2   α3  ρ2  ρ3

γ1   γ2   γ3   ρ1   ρ

δ δ2   δ ρ1   ρ2 

α1    γ1   δσ2  σ3 

α  γ2   δσ1   σ3

α  γ3   δ3  σ1   σ2  .

Context for the poem: Quark Rock.
Context for the physics: Dirac Matrices.

Friday, September 11, 2020

In Memoriam

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:14 pm
 
From the Vanderbilt University obituary of Vaughan F. R. Jones —

"During the mid-1980s, while Jones was working on a problem in von Neumann algebra theory, which is related to the foundations of quantum mechanics, he discovered an unexpected link between that theory and knot theory, a mathematical field dating back to the 19th century.

Specifically, he found a new mathematical expression—now known as the Jones polynomial—for distinguishing between different types of knots as well as links in three-dimensional space. Jones’ discovery had been missed by topologists during the previous 60 years, and his finding contributed to his selection as a Fields Medalist.

'Now there is an area of mathematics called
quantum topology, which basically followed
from his original work,'

said Dietmar Bisch, professor of mathematics." [Link added.]

Related to Jones's work —

"Topological Quantum Information Theory" at
the website of Louis H. Kauffman —
http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Quanta.pdf.

Kauffman

Welcome to AMS-LaTeX

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:26 pm

Elsewhere on that same date —

Monday, October 21, 2019

Algebra and Space… Illustrated.

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:26 pm

Related entertainment —

Detail:

   George Steiner

"Perhaps an insane conceit."

 

Perhaps.

 

See Quantum Tesseract Theorem .

 

Perhaps Not.

 

 See Dirac and Geometry .

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

The Joy of Six

Note that in the pictures below of the 15 two-subsets of a six-set,
the symbols 1 through 6 in Hudson's square array of 1905 occupy the
same positions as the anticommuting Dirac matrices in Arfken's 1985
square array. Similarly occupying these positions are the skew lines
within a generalized quadrangle (a line complex) inside PG(3,2).

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Related narrative The "Quantum Tesseract Theorem."

Friday, September 27, 2019

The Black List

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:46 am

"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out
how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with
algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have
been any algebra' …."

— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962,
page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by 
Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
 

Metaphor —

Algebra —

The 16 Dirac matrices form six anticommuting sets of five matrices each (Arfken 1985, p. 214):

1. alpha_1alpha_2alpha_3alpha_4alpha_5,

2. y_1y_2y_3y_4y_5,

3. delta_1delta_2delta_3rho_1rho_2,

4. alpha_1y_1delta_1sigma_2sigma_3,

5. alpha_2y_2delta_2sigma_1sigma_3,

6. alpha_3y_3delta_3sigma_1sigma_2.

SEE ALSO:  Pauli Matrices

REFERENCES:

Arfken, G. Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 3rd ed.  Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 211-217, 1985.

Berestetskii, V. B.; Lifshitz, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. "Algebra of Dirac Matrices." §22 in Quantum Electrodynamics, 2nd ed.  Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, pp. 80-84, 1982.

Bethe, H. A. and Salpeter, E. Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms.  New York: Plenum, pp. 47-48, 1977.

Bjorken, J. D. and Drell, S. D. Relativistic Quantum Mechanics.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Dirac, P. A. M. Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed.  Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Goldstein, H. Classical Mechanics, 2nd ed.  Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 580, 1980.

Good, R. H. Jr. "Properties of Dirac Matrices." Rev. Mod. Phys. 27, 187-211, 1955.

Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha:  Dirac Matrices

CITE THIS AS:

Weisstein, Eric W.  "Dirac Matrices."

From MathWorld— A Wolfram Web Resource. 
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DiracMatrices.html

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

— Wallace Stevens, "The Motive for Metaphor"

Friday, August 16, 2019

Nocciolo

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:45 am

(Continued)

IMAGE- 'Nocciolo': A 'kernel' for Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum: The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set as points in a Galois geometry.

A revision of the above diagram showing
the Galois-addition-table structure —

Related tables from August 10

See "Schoolgirl Space Revisited."

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Schoolgirl Space* Revisited:

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:51 pm

The Square "Inscape" Model of
the Generalized Quadrangle W(2)

Click image to enlarge.

* The title refers to the role of PG (3,2) in Kirkman's schoolgirl problem.
For some backstory, see my post Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines
and, more generally, posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Schoolgirl Space for Quantum Mystics

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:16 pm

From a post on St. Andrew's Day, 2017

See also "E-Numbers" and "E-Girls."

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Old Pathways in Science:

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:37 pm

The Quantum Tesseract Theorem Revisited

From page 274 — 

"The secret  is that the super-mathematician expresses by the anticommutation
of  his operators the property which the geometer conceives as  perpendicularity
of displacements.  That is why on p. 269 we singled out a pentad of anticommuting
operators, foreseeing that they would have an immediate application in describing
the property of perpendicular directions without using the traditional picture of space.
They express the property of perpendicularity without the picture of perpendicularity.

Thus far we have touched only the fringe of the structure of our set of sixteen E-operators.
Only by entering deeply into the theory of electrons could I show the whole structure
coming into evidence."

A related illustration, from posts tagged Dirac and Geometry —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Compare and contrast Eddington's use of the word "perpendicular"
with a later use of the word by Saniga and Planat.

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Cremona-Richmond

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:34 pm

The following are some notes on the history of Clifford algebras
and finite geometry suggested by the "Clifford Modules" link in a
Log24 post of March 12, 2005

A more recent appearance of the configuration —

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

An Inscape for Douthat

Some images, and a definition, suggested by my remarks here last night
on Apollo and Ross Douthat's remarks today on "The Return of Paganism" —

Detail of Feb. 20, 1986, note by Steven H. Cullinane on Weyl's 'relativity problem'

Kibler's 2008 'Variations on a theme' illustrated.

In finite geometry and combinatorics,
an inscape  is a 4×4 array of square figures,
each figure picturing a subset of the overall 4×4 array:


 

Related material — the phrase
"Quantum Tesseract Theorem" and  

A.  An image from the recent
      film "A Wrinkle in Time" — 

B.  A quote from the 1962 book —

"There's something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz."

Friday, December 7, 2018

The Angel Particle

(Continued from this morning)

Majorana spinors and fermions at ncatlab

The Gibbons paper on the geometry of Majorana spinors and the Kummer configuration

"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

Geometric incarnation and the Kummer configuration

See also other Log24 posts tagged Kummerhenge.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Blackboard Jungle Continues.

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 6:19 pm

From the 1955 film "Blackboard Jungle" —

From a trailer for the recent film version of A Wrinkle in Time

Detail of the phrase "quantum tesseract theorem":

From the 1962 book —

"There's something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz."

Related mathematics from Koen Thas that some might call a
"quantum tesseract theorem" —

Some background —

Koen Thas, 'Unextendible Mututally Unbiased Bases' (2016)

See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry. For more
background on finite  geometry, see a web page
at Thas's institution, Ghent University.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Dirac and Geometry (continued)

"Just fancy a scale model of Being 
made out of string and cardboard."

Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer's Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington

"… a treatise on Kummer's quartic surface."

The "super-mathematician" Eddington did not see fit to mention
the title or the author of the treatise he discussed.

See Hudson + Kummer in this  journal.

See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.

Monday, March 12, 2018

“Quantum Tesseract Theorem?”

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

Remarks related to a recent film and a not-so-recent film.

For some historical background, see Dirac and Geometry in this journal.

Also (as Thas mentions) after Saniga and Planat —

The Saniga-Planat paper was submitted on December 21, 2006.

Excerpts from this  journal on that date —

A Halmos tombstone and the tale of HAL and the pod bay doors

     "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Koen Thas and Quantum Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:23 am

'General Quantum Theory,' by Koen Thas, Dec. 13, 2017, preprint

This post supplies some background for earlier posts tagged
Quantum Tesseract Theorem.

Monday, January 8, 2018

Raiders of the Lost Theorem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:15 pm
 

The Quantum Tesseract Theorem 

 


 

Raiders —

A Wrinkle in Time
starring Storm Reid,
Reese Witherspoon,
Oprah Winfrey &
Mindy Kaling

 

Time Magazine  December 25, 2017 – January 1, 2018

Saturday, December 23, 2017

The Right Stuff

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:12 pm

A figure related to the general connecting theorem  of Koen Thas —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Ron Shaw on the 15 lines of the classical generalized quadrangle W(2), a general linear complex in PG(3,2)

See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry in this  journal.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may, if they so fancy, call
the above Thas connecting theorem a "quantum tesseract theorem ."

The Patterning

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:25 pm

See a Log24 search for "Patterning Windows."

Related material (Click for context) —

.

IT Girl (for Sweet Home Alabama)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:35 am

Sophia Lillis in Stephen King's IT (2017)— 'Right stuff' question

Friday, December 22, 2017

IT

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:08 pm

Movie marquee on Camazotz, from the 2003 film of 'A Wrinkle in Time'

From a Log24 post of October 10, 2017

Koen Thas, 'Unextendible Mututally Unbiased Bases' (Sept. 2016)

Related material from May 25, 2016 —

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Wrinkles

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

TIME magazine, issue of December 25th, 2017 —

" In 2003, Hand worked with Disney to produce a made-for-TV movie.
Thanks to budget constraints, among other issues, the adaptation
turned out bland and uninspiring. It disappointed audiences,
L’Engle and Hand. 'This is not the dream,' Hand recalls telling herself.
'I’m sure there were people at Disney that wished I would go away.' "

Not the dream?  It was, however, the nightmare, presenting very well
the encounter in Camazotz of Charles Wallace with the Tempter.

From a trailer for the latest version —

Detail:

From the 1962 book —

"There's something phoney in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten in the state of Camazotz."

Song adapted from a 1960 musical —

"In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happy-ever-aftering
Than here in Camazotz!"

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Geometry

Google search result for Plato + Statesman + interlacing + interweaving

See also Symplectic in this journal.

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  figure appears in remarks on
the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2). See also
related remarks on the notion of  linear  (or line ) complex
in the finite projective space PG(3,2) —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Ron Shaw on the 15 lines of the classical generalized quadrangle W(2), a general linear complex in PG(3,2)

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Another 35-Year Wait

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

The title refers to today's earlier post "The 35-Year Wait."

A check of my activities 35 years ago this fall, in the autumn
of 1982, yields a formula I prefer to the nonsensical, but famous,
"canonical formula" of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The Lévi-Strauss formula

My "inscape" formula, from a note of Sept. 22, 1982 —

S = f ( f ( X ) ) .

Some mathematics from last year related to the 1982 formula —

Koen Thas, 'Unextendible Mututally Unbiased Bases' (2016)

See also Inscape in this  journal and posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Jargon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:00 pm

See "sacerdotal jargon" in this journal.

For those who prefer scientific  jargon —

"… open its reading to
combinational possibilities
outside its larger narrative flow.
The particulars of attention,
whether subjective or objective,
are unshackled through form,
and offered as a relational matrix …."

— Kent Johnson in a 1993 essay

For some science that is not just jargon, see

and, also from posts tagged Dirac and Geometry

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

The above line complex also illustrates an outer automorphism
of the symmetric group S6. See last Thursday's post "Rotman and
the Outer Automorphism
."

Friday, June 3, 2016

Bruins and van Dam

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 am

A review of some recent posts on Dirac and geometry,
each of which mentions the late physicist Hendrik van Dam:

The first of these posts mentions the work of E. M. Bruins.
Some earlier posts that cite Bruins:

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Kummer and Dirac

From "Projective Geometry and PT-Symmetric Dirac Hamiltonian,"
Y. Jack Ng  and H. van Dam, 
Physics Letters B , Volume 673, Issue 3,
23 March 2009, Pages 237–239

(http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2579v2, last revised Feb. 20, 2009)

" Studies of spin-½ theories in the framework of projective geometry
have been undertaken before. See, e.g., Ref. [4]. 1 "

1 These papers are rather mathematical and technical.
The authors of the first two papers discuss the Dirac equation
in terms of the Plucker-Klein correspondence between lines of
a three-dimensional projective space and points of a quadric
in a five-dimensional projective space. The last paper shows
that the Dirac equation bears a certain relation to Kummer’s
surface, viz., the structure of the Dirac ring of matrices is 
related to that of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . ."

[4]

O. Veblen
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA , 19 (1933), p. 503
Full Text via CrossRef

E.M. Bruins
Proc. Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. , 52 (1949), p. 1135

F.C. Taylor Jr., Master thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (1968), unpublished


A remark of my own on the structure of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . .

See that structure in this  journal, for instance —

See as well yesterday morning's post.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Rosenhain and Göpel Revisited

The authors Taormina and Wendland in the previous post
discussed some mathematics they apparently did not know was
related to a classic 1905 book by R. W. H. T. Hudson, Kummer's
Quartic Surface
.

"This famous book is a prototype for the possibility
of explaining and exploring a many-faceted topic of
research, without focussing on general definitions,
formal techniques, or even fancy machinery. In this
regard, the book still stands as a highly recommendable,
unparalleled introduction to Kummer surfaces, as a
permanent source of inspiration and, last but not least, 
as an everlasting symbol of mathematical culture."

— Werner Kleinert, Mathematical Reviews ,
     as quoted at Amazon.com

Some 4×4 diagrams from that book are highly relevant to the
discussion by Taormina and Wendland of the 4×4 squares within
the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis that were later,
in 1987, described by Curtis as pictures of the vector 4-space over
the two-element Galois field GF(2).

Hudson did not think of his 4×4 diagrams as illustrating a vector space,
but he did use them to picture certain subsets of the 16 cells in each
diagram that he called Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads .

Some related work of my own (click images for related posts)—

Rosenhain tetrads as 20 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)

IMAGE- Desargues's theorem in light of Galois geometry

Göpel tetrads as 15 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Related terminology describing the Göpel tetrads above

Ron Shaw on symplectic geometry and a linear complex in PG(3,2)

Monday, February 8, 2016

A Game with Four Letters

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Related material — Posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.

For an example of what Eddington calls "an open mind,"
see the 1958 letters of Nanavira Thera.
(Among the "Early Letters" in Seeking the Path ).

Monday, November 23, 2015

Dirac and Line Geometry

Some background for my post of Nov. 20,
"Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines" —

First page of 'Configurations in Quantum Mechanics,' by E.M. Bruins, 1959

His earlier paper that Bruins refers to, "Line Geometry
and Quantum Mechanics," is available in a free PDF.

For a biography of Bruins translated by Google, click here.

For some additional historical background going back to
Eddington, see Gary W. Gibbons, "The Kummer
Configuration and the Geometry of Majorana Spinors,"
pages 39-52 in Oziewicz et al., eds., Spinors, Twistors,
Clifford Algebras, and Quantum Deformations:
Proceedings of the Second Max Born Symposium held
near Wrocław, Poland, September 1992
 . (Springer, 2012,
originally published by Kluwer in 1993.)

For more-recent remarks on quantum geometry, see a
paper by Saniga cited in today's update to my Nov. 20 post

Friday, November 20, 2015

Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:45 pm

(Continued from November 13)

The work of Ron Shaw in this area, ca. 1994-1995, does not
display explicitly the correspondence between anticommutativity
in the set of Dirac matrices and skewness in a line complex of
PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the 2-element Galois field.

Here is an explicit picture —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

References:  

Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214

Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986

Shaw, Ron, "Finite Geometry, Dirac Groups, and the Table of
Real Clifford Algebras," undated article at ResearchGate.net

Update of November 23:

See my post of Nov. 23 on publications by E. M. Bruins
in 1949 and 1959 on Dirac matrices and line geometry,
and on another author who gives some historical background
going back to Eddington.

Some more-recent related material from the Slovak school of
finite geometry and quantum theory —

Saniga, 'Finite Projective Spaces, Geometric Spreads of Lines and Multi-Qubits,' excerpt

The matrices underlying the Saniga paper are those of Pauli, not
those of Dirac, but these two sorts of matrices are closely related.

Friday, November 13, 2015

A Connection between the 16 Dirac Matrices and the Large Mathieu Group



Note that the six anticommuting sets of Dirac matrices listed by Arfken
correspond exactly to the six spreads in the above complex of 15 projective
lines of PG(3,2) fixed under a symplectic polarity (the diamond theorem
correlation
 
). As I noted in 1986, this correlation underlies the Miracle
Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, hence also the large Mathieu group.

References:

Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214

Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986

Related material:

The 6-set in my 1986 note above also appears in a 1996 paper on
the sixteen Dirac matrices by David M. Goodmanson —

Background reading:

Ron Shaw on finite geometry, Clifford algebras, and Dirac groups 
(undated compilation of publications from roughly 1994-1995)—

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Algebra and Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:59 am

"Perhaps an insane conceit …."    Perhaps.

Related remarks on algebra and space —

"The Quality Without a Name" (Log24, August 26, 2015).

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Princeton’s Christopher Robin

The title is that of a talk (see video) given by
George Dyson at a Princeton land preservation trust,
reportedly on March 21, 2013.  The talk's subtitle was
"Oswald Veblen and the Six-hundred-acre Woods."

Meanwhile

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Geometry of Göpel Tetrads (continued)

m759 @ 7:00 PM

An update to Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2)
supplies some background from
Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986,
and from a 2002 AMS Transactions  paper.

IMAGE- Göpel tetrads in an inscape, April 1986

Related material for those who prefer narrative
to mathematics:

Log24 on June 6, 2006:

 

The Omen:


Now we are 
 

6!

Related material for those who prefer mathematics
to narrative:

What the Omen narrative above and the mathematics of Veblen
have in common is the number 6. Veblen, who came to
Princeton in 1905 and later helped establish the Institute,
wrote extensively on projective geometry.  As the British
geometer H. F. Baker pointed out,  6 is a rather important number
in that discipline.  For the connection of 6 to the Göpel tetrads
figure above from March 21, see a note from May 1986.

See also last night's Veblen and Young in Light of Galois.

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract." — Madeleine L'Engle

Thursday, December 5, 2002

Thursday December 5, 2002

Sacerdotal Jargon

From the website

Abstracts and Preprints in Clifford Algebra [1996, Oct 8]:

Paper:  clf-alg/good9601
From:  David M. Goodmanson
Address:  2725 68th Avenue S.E., Mercer Island, Washington 98040

Title:  A graphical representation of the Dirac Algebra

Abstract:  The elements of the Dirac algebra are represented by sixteen 4×4 gamma matrices, each pair of which either commute or anticommute. This paper demonstrates a correspondence between the gamma matrices and the complete graph on six points, a correspondence that provides a visual picture of the structure of the Dirac algebra.  The graph shows all commutation and anticommutation relations, and can be used to illustrate the structure of subalgebras and equivalence classes and the effect of similarity transformations….

Published:  Am. J. Phys. 64, 870-880 (1996)


The following is a picture of K6, the complete graph on six points.  It may be used to illustrate various concepts in finite geometry as well as the properties of Dirac matrices described above.

The complete graph on a six-set


From
"The Relations between Poetry and Painting,"
by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

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