“Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses.”
- Pierre Ramond, particle physicist, University of Florida
- Pierre Ramond, particle physicist, University of Florida
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The story relates a picture of William Rowan Harrison strolling the Royal Canal with his wife, in Dublin, on an October afternoon in 1843, when some trap door in his head fell open and he slipped inside the room where quaternion groups live.
These are the mathematical constituents Einstein would use to model his universe; they are the result of cleverly pairing complex numbers, who themselves are the joints and joists of quantum mechanics.
Harrison beheld his equation and dashed to the nearby Broome bridge, so dazzled I imagine, that he carved the equation into stone, lest it prove flighty.
I mean to write about mathematicians more often.
I imagine their high hat triplet, their Jay-Z split syllable roll, to be fitting tangents to curves in four dimensions, or something of the sort.