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Saturday, October 11, 2025

Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Alchemist’s Chessboard

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

Material related to the previous post and to Alfred Bester's
1981 followup to The Stars My Destination  titled The Deceivers

The Lapis Philosophorum :

"The lapis  was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia  in general."
— Aion , by C. G. Jung

"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination , by Alfred Bester

And from Bester's The Deceivers :

Meta  Physics

"'… Think of a match.  You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released.  Friction does it.  But when Meta  excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match.  It's the chess legend for real.'

'I don't know it.'

'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah.  The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what.  The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.'

'That doesn't sound like much.'"

Related material :

Geometry of the I Ching

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group

The reference in the previous post to the work of Guitart and
The Road to Universal Logic  suggests a fiction involving
the symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168.

See The Diamond Archetype and a fictional account of the road to Hell 

'PyrE' in Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'

The cover illustration below has been adapted to
replace the flames of PyrE with the eightfold cube.

IMAGE- 'The Stars My Destination' (with cover slightly changed)

For related symmetric generation of a much larger group, see Solomon's Cube.

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