Mandala: A Thing Of Beauty
Posted in Fine-tuning, Just For Fun, Nature on March 19th, 2007 by JoyI have mentioned in passing a background in physics, an interest in the many competing wannabe replacements for the good ol' Standard Model (and contestants for what qualifies as a 'Theory of Everything'), and a particular interest from investigations of the phenomenon of consciousness in an 8-dimensional model of reality both psychic and physical. As opposed to an 11, 22 or infinite dimensional reality per other theoretical models, that is.
ScienceDaily reports today that Mathematicians Map One Of The Most Complicated Structures, which is the symmetry Lie group E8. The project took an international team of 18 mathematicians 4 years working on separate portions of the calculation, and 77 hours of supercomputer time to put them all together. They had to 'map' the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object (in 248-dimensional E8) as representations in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries for 240 vectors in an 8-dimensional space. A rather impressive accomplishment.
I'd reproduce the computer generation of the Gosset polytope 421 drawn by Peter McMullen in the 1960s because it's so pretty, but it's right there on the ScienceDaily page, so do check it out for yourself!
