[Beowulf] Teaching Scientific Computation (looking fo the perfect text)

Wed Nov 21 16:15:26 PST 2007

On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, Peter St. John wrote:

> Speaking of octonions (ahem), has everyone read "An Exceptionally
> Simple Theory of Everything"?
> The wiki article is at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything
> and the ArXiv item, 31 pp PDF, I think worth skimming even if not
> ...any of several relevant difficult specialities...is at
> http://arxiv.org/pdf/0711.0770
> For those who care about uniting quantuum mechanics with general
> relativity via 248-dimensional Exceptional Simple Lie Algebras. Really
> it's a nice presentation, obviously more than a little esoteric for
> almost anyone, but quite well presented for a quite general audience
> all things considered. And that's a lot of all things to consider, I
> admit.
> Peter

Is this E8?  I'll check it out.  But my exposure to it so far convinces
me that it is a field dominated by serious, serious flakes...

It didn't used to be.  E8 is a universal covering group for a whole lot
of this and that, so in principle it CAN work, but IIRC there were
problems.  I don't know about insurmountable, but physics requires more
than just pretty pictures of elementary particle zoos.  One KNOWS one
can do that, because it is a covering group.

   rgb

>
> On Nov 21, 2007 3:25 PM, Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
>> Robert G. Brown wrote:
>>
>>>>  A = B + CROSS_PRODUCT(C,D)
>>>
>>> Ah but are A and B vectors or pseudovectors?  Just kidding...;-)
>>
>> Quaternions ... :)
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Joseph Landman, Ph.D
>> Founder and CEO
>> Scalable Informatics LLC,
>> email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
>> web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
>>        http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
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>>
>>
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>

-- 
Robert G. Brown
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
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