Everyone,

You could also call this "Raksha and Bluelamp's Crackpot Speculation Topic," because that is undoubtedly what it will turn into in short order. I decided to post it for a number of reasons. The first is that I am finally coming to the end of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous and wanted to have a topic on Aantares where I could discuss it with anyone interested, or failing that--simply spout off about it. But I know I won't be alone because my good friend Bluelamp has been interested in the Enneagram for many years and knows a lot more about it than I do.

To start with, here's the link Sean posted on the "White Horses" topic after I mentioned the Enneagram: http://www.ennea.com/symbol/symbol.htm

Please understand that I'm posting this topic NOT because I know anything about Enneagrams, but because I want to know more about them than I do now, which is next to nothing. G.I. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian esoteric teacher who popularized this figure in the West (first in Russia and then in Europe after the Russian Revolution), claimed it was of very ancient origin and kept strictly secret until the early 20th Century. I suspect however that it was his own invention, a graphic representation of his esoteric teachings.

Some background information on Gurdjieff from Wikipedia: G.I. Gurdjieff

--Linda

Everyone,

The other reason I started this topic is because the "White Horses" topic was starting to get all cluttered up with off-topic posts as soon as Bluelamp quoted Tony Smith and posted a link to one of his online articles. That's because Jeff read the article and pronounced Tony Smith a crackpot who couldn't even get his articles into the Cornell Archive. That got Bluelamp all bent out of shape because Tony Smith is a good friend and colleague of his, which I already knew but Jeff didn't.

Besides, the Cornell Archive of physics articles is apparently highly politicized. Whether or not a person gets an article in there seems to depend less on its scientific merit than whether the author of said article has managed to piss off the "wrong" people, possibly for some reason entirely unrelated to science. At least one Nobel laureate has also complained about their highly arbitrary and capricious "admissions standards."

All of this back-and-forth naturally involved a lot of posts which had nothing to with the End Times, at least not from a biblical perspective. So then Donald (EQ) started hinting that we were off-topic. Since I'm not all that interested in strictly biblical speculations but thought the posts were interesting in their own right, I decided to use the altercation about Tony Smith as an excuse to start the new topic I wanted to start anyway.

--Linda

Linda, one little just as mysterious hint that the Enneagram may have had a life before Gurdjieff is this, which is known as the Celtic Enneagram.



from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Enneagram

"I encountered this version of the enneagram in witchcraft circles before Shah published his remarks about the "disguised" enneagram and found it of great interest. It resembles the "sigil of saturn" which can be found in the grimoires and has other points of interest relating it to cetain Chinese symbols..... Note that the numbers in sequence make an infinity symbol and of course the inner lines follows the same sequence as the more familiar enneagram."

The above is from Jeremy Dixon. Before Geocities went away, he had a webpage about it. I cited him in one of my papers and he actually linked to my paper from his webpage even though we've never actually communicated (he also talked about stuff from Tony Smith and John Fudjack).

This version is actually closer to the real geometry, it has the opposites adding to 9, at his old webpage he mentions the enneagram lore that the 3 and 6 are swappable (in the real geometry there are two 3s and two 6s), the 9 in the center indicates that two nines average to zero (they are opposite personalities since they add to a multiple of 9).

Also if you swap the 3 and 6 you get the semi-magic square of triads where each vertical, horizontal and diagonal line adds to a multiple of 9:

126
594
378

-- John G.

John,

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful glyph...thank you for posting that! I like it even better than Gurdjieff's classic Enneagram. When it first appeared on my screen it showed up in a "stepped" form like a cross stitch pattern. I liked that even better, because unconsciously (okay, semi-consciously) I was already dealing with the technical problems inherent in charting a classic Enneagram.

That might seem to be getting a little bit ahead of myself, since I've only looked at other people's drawings of it online and in the Ouspensky book. I haven't personally tried to construct one on paper using a ruler and compass, as I've done with the other more common geometric figures. But as you may recall, I always want to make a needlework pattern out of everything! However, there are certain technical difficulties involved in representing any geometric form not based on right angles on a square grid. Hexagram figures are bad enough, and pentagrams are even worse. I wanted to "do something" with the Enneagram, even though I still don't understand it, because the layout is so unusual.

But the figure you posted appears to be based on 90-degree and 45-degree angles, while still being an Enneagram and still being very unusual. I think it would make a good layout for a sampler.

--Linda

P.S. On second look--no, it isn't based on 90-degree angles after all. But it would still be easier to chart because of the symmetry. It would be an interesting design challenge and I'm going to try it!

Jeff,

You posted in a reply on the "White Horses" topic:

quote:

This kind of pathological thinking attracts similar people looking to tie everything together in some grand theory of the universe. I admire the quest and the sincerity of the people involved. But the ideas are mad. They're not consistent. They argue by analogy. They throw in all sorts of idiotic ideas in the process. They're not science.

John, look at your own post. You mention that Tony Smith got an idea from Ramon Llull, who influenced Leibniz, and that he is friends with Finkelstein. Well, Llull died 700 years ago; he was an astrologer; he was a mystic; he had visions of Jesus on the Cross; he was regarded as an alchemist. I suppose it's OK to get ideas from anyone, but our knowledge of the universe has advanced a wee bit in the past 700 years and I don't think that referring to mystical writings means that the work done today is any more or less credible because there are analogies in those ancient writings. It's meaningless.

Do you really consider unitive thinking "pathological"? Whether you do or not, from ancient times through the Renaissance it was the norm for mathematicians and scientists to be mystics, and very often astrologers and alchemists as well. Consider Pythagoras, for one very obvious example. Does the fact that he was a mystic invalidate the theorem that bears his name? The same was true in Egypt as in Greece. The engineering feats of these ancient people show that whatever the basis for their theories, they were able to get real-world results with them.

Right up through the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, chemistry had still not established itself as a separate branch of science from alchemy. Now I know this is going to establish my crackpot credentials even beyond what they are already with you, but I am not so sure this was such a great development over the long term. I mean the separation of chemistry from alchemy and the subsequent dismissal of alchemy as "superstition" and not real science at all.

For one thing, alchemy was not only about the alleged transmutation of the elements (producing gold out of base metals), or the production of the Philosopher's Stone. That was a part of it, but not the whole story and maybe not even the main story. Mostly alchemy is about an inner psychological or spiritual process. As such, it was the subject for Carl Jung's magnum opus, Psychology and Alchemy. It was Jung's thesis that medieval and Renaissance alchemy was the "missing link" between ancient Gnosticism and related spiritual traditions and modern psychology, and specifically his psychology.

You appear to be very caught up in the science VERSUS religion dualism, taking sides in opposition to the fundamentalists but still not willing to think outside the old dualistic box. You don't seem to want to consider a more unitive approach, in which science and religion (spirituality would be a better word in this context) might not be opposites at all. Again, this was not the norm in the past, and might not be the norm in the future either.

--Linda

quote:

Besides, the Cornell Archive of physics articles is apparently highly politicized.

No, it isn't. Two complaints (one by a crackpot)from a decade ago does not make the Archive politicized. On the contrary. Check this information:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/re...parg.archive.ws.html

quote:

The arXiv contains some 170,000 brief papers in physics, mathematics and computer science, with almost 3,000 new submissions coming in each month. Unlike articles submitted to professional journals, papers submitted to the archive are immediately available online, at no cost to the user. Also unlike articles submitted to professional journals, postings to arXiv.org are not peer-viewed. Except for some rudimentary screening for inappropriate off-topic submissions, almost anyone can post almost anything. It's up to the reader to decide what is worthwhile.

The result, Ginsparg has said, is to "level the playing field." Researchers in Third World countries, where paper copies of journals may arrive months after publication, if at all, have the same access to research reports as do researchers in industrialized nations. On the other side of the coin, researchers in small, obscure places have just as much chance to make their voices heard as those in Ivy League halls. In one recent incident, Lubos Motl, an undergraduate physics student at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, scooped the Ph.D.s with an elegant solution to a major problem. On the Internet, it seems, no one knows you're an undergraduate.

Ginsparg believes that all scientific publishing eventually will move to the Internet, doing away with paper journals. That move will streamline a system where, as Ginsparg puts it, scholars give their material to publishers for free and their institutions then pay thousands of dollars in subscription fees to read it in the journals. The compensation, up to now at least, has been that the leading journals provide "peer review," where respected members of a field of study read submitted articles and report to the journal on whether or not they represent good, original research. The prestige of passing peer review and publishing in an established journal is still important to the careers of academic researchers, as is the quality control provided to the archival literature.

The papers that appear on arXiv.org are technically "preprints," the electronic equivalent of paper reports that researchers circulate among themselves in advance of formal publication.

Point is that crackpots were using its free and open nature to post papers that could not ever pass peer review--because they are nonsensical and not scientific. That's one of the dangers of opening up communication. So a few of Smith's papers got in, and then the archives got complaints that if any kind of garbage was allowed there would be no way to find the significant, real papers by REAL scientists.

Tony Smith points to the fact that his early papers were admitted to the archive as proof of something or other. All they're proof of is that there was no supervision and anything could get in, before the rules were tightened a very tiny amount--demanding an e-mail address at a university, for example.

Yes, there are disputes and politics in academia. No doubt. But that's not the issue here.

Sorry to butt in on your topic. I simply don't understand why all the discussions here focus on either known crackpot nonsense or, at times, fringe science that very few believe in. You're discussing Gurdjieff and Ouspensky? AGAIN? Their ideas are cultist nonsense. All these folks are trying to draw unified theories which explain everything from molecular motion to personalities to life/death to aliens. I wouldn't be surprised to see Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster appear as well. They're all attempts to squeeze a very complicated universe into a narrow framework, and most of the ideas are by nature impossible to prove or disprove because they are so vague that even the believers argue with each other about what their words mean.

Take enneagrams, for instance.

quote:

Personality typing is somewhat arbitrary. The classification systems used by Ichazo, and modified by Palmer and others according to their own idiosyncratic beliefs, are not without merit. For example, one certainly could learn much of importance about oneself by focusing on one's central fault or faults, but those who advocate using the enneagram seem to be interested in much more than a bit of self-knowledge. Entire metaphysical systems, psychologies, religions, cosmologies and New Age springboards to higher consciousness and fuller being are said to be found by looking into the enneagram. There is seemingly no end to what one can find in these nine lines.
...
There doesn't seem to be any way to validate this typology. At the heart of this New Age spiritual psychology are a number of concepts vaguely reminiscent of biorhythms, numerology, astrology, tarot card reading, and Myers-Briggs personality inventories. Nothing in the typology resembles anything approaching a scientific interest in personality.
...
Some think there are sixteen basic personality types and use The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® . As Jung said, there could be any number of types, even 360 (McGuire: p. 342), if we wished. Who is right? Maybe they're both wrong. Perhaps we need only think of two types, those from Mars and those from Venus, as John Gray, Ph.D., claims.

Source:
http://www.skepdic.com/enneagr.html

Anyway, point is that there's no scientific research behind ANY of these notions. They're philosophical constructs, loosely defined, never tested. No experiments, no replication, nothing fruitful to be gained. They're been around for hundreds of years in various forms. They're just pointless wastes of time and energy.

Study some REAL science some time. Not cultists or crackpots or mystics. There's plenty to learn--and what you learn is real science, not untestable garbage.

Jeff

quote:

You're discussing Gurdjieff and Ouspensky? AGAIN?

Jeff,

AGAIN? I didn't know we discussed them earlier. Well, maybe Bluelamp did, but I couldn't really participate as I had not yet read Ouspensky. Now I have. I still don't know a whole lot, so I posted this topic in an effort to learn and hopefully to integrate what I'm just learning with what I knew already.

quote:

Their ideas are cultist nonsense. All these folks are trying to draw unified theories which explain everything from molecular motion to personalities to life/death to aliens.

I LOVE unified theories and always have...so do me something! I sincerely hope one of the unified field theories currently being tossed around actually pans out and becomes accepted as science. I have a strong feeling that when that happens, science and its practical applications will have taken a quantum leap beyond what is now possible.

Besides, this is the Religion and Spirituality forum! Where else are we supposed to go on Aantares if we want to indulge in cutting-edge speculation, even if it's crackpot speculation?

--Linda

Jeff, Tony's physics is certainly not crackpot, it's much like Garrett Lisi's and Lisi has the most downloaded paper ever on the archive. Tony corrects math for John Baez. Tony's extremely good at Lie Algebra, Clifford Algebra, and Jordan Algebra. If people just want to look at Lisi instead of Tony, I guess I'm OK with that, at least Tony's model is getting looked at for a change. Again if you have a problem with Tony, just look at Lisi.

Tony by the way went to grad school twenty years after his Princeton undergraduate math degree just to audit Finkelstein's classes. He briefly thought about getting a PhD but the general test at the beginning was too general given that it was twenty years since his undergraduate degree and his degree wasn't even physics. It's NOT that he had a problem with Finkelstein's courses.

Here's a conversation I jumped into between Tony and Urs Schreiber who co-writes a physics blog with John Baez:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~...323&cpage=1#comments

John Gonsowski says:
January 11, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Urs, Tony’s model uses E6 much like the E6 GUT one gets from the E8xE8 heterotic string. I think for both Tony and the heterotic string the two half-spinors of D4 relate to E6 orbifolding. The difference may be in the use of the D4 vector part of the Triality. If you think of D5 in between D4 and E6 or the SO(10) GUT in between the SU(5) GUT and the E6 GUT. That SO(10) as John Baez mentions in his recent paper is a nice way to see a 10-dim spacetime. That 10 is a D5 vector and is a nice way to see why Tony uses the 8-dim vector of the D4 Triality as spacetime. The two extra dimensions Tony has for an SO(10) spacetime makes the spacetime complex. D5/D4xU(1) has 16-dims or the 10-dim has 2-dim added to the 4 big dimensions to get a 6-dim CP3 twistor. So Tony has spacetime as a substructure of the String. That Gross comment about space and time needing to go away (as the superstructure of the string) seems related to this. Gross asks what then replaces spacetime. For Tony it’s the Clifford algebra. Kind of makes sense to think of Lie Algebras as a substructure of Clifford algebras. It kind of bothers me that so many people seem to have trouble with the general idea of Tony’s model, it’s not that complicated. If you were looking at something like Tony’s Lagrangian after dimensional reduction I could see where a discussion is needed, there are tons of places I just take Tony’s word for it, he seems rather good at math. As for Tony giving credit to ancient civilizations for finding Clifford Algebra and Lie Algebra patterns, lots of the patterns like D-series root vectors are rather simple and it is not so hard to imagine ancient people noticing them. I personally believe like Tony that some ancient people were quite good at noticing patterns that aren’t all that easy to see.

Urs says:
January 11, 2006 at 3:16 pm
I will mention that the key is that in a Lagrangian density over 8-dim spacetime, the dimension of fermion/spinor PSI is 7/2 (as opposed to dimension 3/2 over 4-dim spacetime), and 8 fermion particles x 7/2 dimension = 28 = 28 gauge bosons x 1 dimension.

If this is really more than numerology it might be interesting. It’s hard to say, for me.

sixteen of the dimensions of bosonic string theory are transmuted from bosonic to fermionic by a dynamical mechanism that involves the decay of the tachyonic degree of freedom

That’s what one would hope. What concrete evidence do we have?

I am somewhat saddened that Lee seems to mostly run around talking about relatively general topics such as background independence and Lenny seems to be running around Lost in his Landscape. Such topics are easy to use as PR hype for the public and funding agencies, but in my opinion they are nowhere near as useful as the hard work of doing some detailed calculations

Well said. We definitely agree on that.

It’s not that there is nobody out there looking hard for new grand (algebraic) structures. P. West and H. Nicolai come to mind with their attempts to integrate everything into E10 and E11. Judging from the abstracts of Nicolai’s papers there seems to be slow but steady progress and mounting evidence that indeed all of 11D supergravity is (a small subset) of the geodesic motion on something like exp(E10/K(E10)).
(http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/string/archives/000353.html)

But things like that are certainly, and unfortunately, in the minority at the moment.

P.S.
If you make John Gonsowski write a comprehensive and coherent pdf exposition of your ideas, I promise to take a detailed look at it. More importantly, others might, too.



That is really sad that Tony's use of algebra is so ignored that there seriously is no one around that understands it better than me with my puny Electrical Engineering degree.

As for personality theory, you seriously know nothing in that area. The big five personality model is very well studied in universities. Journals at Elmira College are how I first got seriously into it. It's very very well studied empirically using twin studies, etc. The Jungian scales I use were correlated by Costa and McCrae to 4 of the 5 big five traits.

The fifth scale in my view is related to Jung via the 8-fold periodicity of Clifford Algebra where Cl(10)=C(8)xCl(2) but that's even over my head so I empirically and geometrically related it to NFJ in Jungian terms and to the Enneagram first quaternity/second quaternity axis and to the inward-outward axis of the Capability Snapshot. You are seriously out of your league when it comes to personality theory.

I coauthored an article with a guy who has a PhD and is on the editorial board for the Journal of Psychological Type. In other words he does peer reviews and has that wonderful PhD, two things you for some odd reason fixate on. So you think John Baez should refuse Tony's math corrections cause of no PhD and no peer reviews (mainly apparently cause I'm the only person on the planet smart enough to peer review Tony).

-- John G.

quote:

Hexagram figures are bad enough, and pentagrams are even worse. I wanted to "do something" with the Enneagram, even though I still don't understand it, because the layout is so unusual.—Raksha

Linda,
     Geometric patterns I understand. If you wish, I'll post simplified directions on my blog for constructing figures with any number of points. All you'll need to make them is a compass, a ruler and a calculator to do divisions. I would like to see a sampler done with the ordinary Enneagram because, when it is viewed as a three-dimensional structure, it becomes an optical illusion, with shifting planes.
Seán

quote:

Originally posted by Sean:

quote:

Hexagram figures are bad enough, and pentagrams are even worse. I wanted to "do something" with the Enneagram, even though I still don't understand it, because the layout is so unusual.—Raksha

Linda,
     Geometric patterns I understand. If you wish, I'll post simplified directions on my blog for constructing figures with any number of points. All you'll need to make them is a compass, a ruler and a calculator to do divisions. I would like to see a sampler done with the ordinary Enneagram because, when it is viewed as a three-dimensional structure, it becomes an optical illusion, with shifting planes.
Seán

Sean,

Thank you! If you'd post simplified directions for constructing an Enneagram on your blog, I would not only look at them but definitely use them. You may or may not realize that I have a fascination with geometric forms going back to my high school geometry class. Although I obviously didn't inherit my father's mathematical ability (he was an engineer), I did noticeably better in geometry than in algebra, and to this day I remain fascinated with geometric patterns. I think I sensed the inherent sacredness of geometry right away. Its logic and order were and remain keys to the logic and order of the Universe, underlying all the surface turbulence.

Another thing you might not realize: What Bluelamp and I quickly discovered we had in common back in the old *P Classic days was not only a common interest in the Jungian archetypes as he has often said. It's also a common interest in sacred geometry, although with his greater math ability he obviously has the greater expertise in this area. But I am more likely to apply what little I do know to the decorative arts that are a continuing source of fascination to me.

--Linda

Related: Lines on our 5-fingered hands (according to Tickle.com) can predict personality traits. This is seems to me it could be related because our hands have 5 fingers; and the personality books about the Enneagram arrange personality into 5 major spaces. Each person primarily lives in two of the five, and then mostly in one of the two foremost spaces. Similarly, we rely upon our thumb and forefinger more than all the other fingers. When Tickle was still operational I tested their system, and I thought it did a good job of talking about my personality based upon the info I put in about the lines on my hands. Does it mean that 5 is the optimal number of personality spaces? I've no idea.

I do not know the meaning of the above, however I think it would be interesting to know if there are sites relating the geometry of the hand with its 4 fingers and thumb to sacred geometry.

Extra stuff I made up and probably not related:

Think of the four inline fingers on one hand as topologically equal to 4 vertices of a pyramid, with the palm of your hand as a square base. Ok, I know they don't look like a pyramid, but spread the four fingers out and place the tips at the corners of the square of your palm on your opposite hand, and you will see a pyramid. The actual topology is to think of your one hand as an unfolded geometric solid, though there is no way to physically fold it up.

You can try to do opposing pyramids with both hands at the same time, but you'll have to turn your wrists inwards. Rather than getting two pyramids your fingers will naturally smush into a trapezoidal cylinder as your pinkies and index fingers slide upon each other, with the thumbs pointing in offset opposite vectors. It will not look like opposing pyramids, but something more like a ying yang ball. Hold your hands in this position while singing the national anthem for your country and you stimulate the economy, or repeat covenants or vows of any kind in this position to help both sides keep their end of the bargain.

I don't care much about degrees or credentials. But if someone who claims to be producing seminal works in physics is totally unable to pass a peer review and get published in a significant journal after decades of trying, that does tell you something about the quality of the work. To say that all of the major journals are prejudiced and that it's just politics and hatred of new ideas is ridiculous--that's paranoia and the usual excuse of cranks.

John, you quote a discussion, but you don't seem to pick up on the fact that underneath there's disbelief hidden by politeness. How else do you explain a sentence like "If this is really more than numerology it might be interesting."

You say "As for personality theory, you seriously know nothing in that area. The big five personality model is very well studied in universities. Journals at Elmira College are how I first got seriously into it. It's very very well studied empirically using twin studies, etc. The Jungian scales I use were correlated by Costa and McCrae to 4 of the 5 big five traits.
" What I know or don't know is irrelevant.

You mention research at Elmira College. Elmira is a small liberal arts school with 1200 students. It has no graduate school. It's hardly a major research institute. There are a number of different models of personality types, often loosely defined. Joining such things into a grand theory of the universe is the problem, not the attempt to classify personalities.

quote:

Tony's use of algebra is so ignored that there seriously is no one around that understands it better than me

Doesn't that tell you something? Fruitful ideas generate discussion, testing, expansion.

quote:

I'm the only person on the planet smart enough to peer review Tony

You want to discuss personality types? OK. What personality type ia associated with Tony's and your claims?

quote:

One of the most important symptoms of pathological narcissism (the Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is grandiosity. Grandiose fantasies (megalomaniac delusions of grandeur) permeate every aspect of the narcissist's personality. They are the reason that the narcissist feels entitled to special treatment which is typically incommensurate with his real accomplishments. The grandiosity gap is the abyss between the narcissist's self-image (as reified by his False Self) and reality.

Source:
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/8-7-2005-74387.asp

Jeff

Jeff, I was just reading journals on the big 5 and Wiggins Circumplexes and Murray Needs at the Elmira College library. I worked for IBM then and I worked with an IBM Organizational Behavior consultant (got material from him too). I'm just saying I'm very well versed in the models used at universities, I'm not just into Jung and the Enneagram.

The channeling forum I'm a member of includes this in the note to all new forum members:

"You'll also find frequent references on the forum to the "Big Five" psychology books, which are extremely helpful tools towards acquiring a basic understanding of your own "machine". Should you decide to explore those books at some point in the future, Laura suggests that they be read in the following order: The Myth of Sanity by Martha Stout; The Narcissistic Family by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman & Robert M. Pressman; Trapped in The Mirror by Elan Golomb; Unholy Hungers by Barbara Hort; and In Sheep's Clothing by George K. Simon."

I know about narcissism. That's not Tony's problem. That conversation with Urs was in 2006. Lisi came out in 2007. Tony's model was ignored in 2006, now the most downloaded model on the entire archive in one that is most like Tony's? Doesn't that tell you something?

Urs by the way was not being polite to Tony. Urs actually verified a major part of Tony's model. The part where Tony is listed as a reference in Wikipedia for Feynman Checkerboards. In fact Tony can't get Urs' verification into the Archive. I bet Urs could if he wanted to. I've had other conversations with Urs about parts of Tony's model, that wasn't the only time I've talked to Urs about Tony.

Like I said before, hopefully Lisi's mistakes get corrected and Lisi's model becomes more Tony-like. Tony, me, and John Baez have mentioned to Lisi the same good alternative to start with. Lisi told me he hasn't given up on a Kaluza-Klein structure so maybe someday. One problem could be political, Lisi is with a Loop Quantum Gravity group and all their work is in 4-dim spacetime, no extra dimensions.

Some quotes from John Baez about Tony, Tony's NOT a crackpot about math and physics any more than Michio Kaku is a crackpot about math and physics for being into UFOs:

"The octonionic projective plane OP2 is not only a symmetric space: it's isotropic! But according to Tony Smith, the complexified version (C ⊗ O)P2 is not isotropic.

I also thank Tony for correcting some errors involving spinors. There's some quite subtle stuff going on here.

I should add that Tony Smith has a bunch of far-out stuff about quaternions, octonions, Clifford algebras, triality, the D4 lattice - you name it! - on his home page.

He engages in more free association than is normally deemed proper in scientific literature - you may raise your eyebrows at sentences like "the Tarot shows the Lie algebra structure of the D4-D5-E6 model, while the I Ching shows its Clifford algebra structure" - but don't be fooled; his mathematics is solid. When it comes to the physics, I'm not sure I buy his theory of everything, but that's not unusual: I don't think I buy anyone's theory of everything!

Let me wrap up by passing on something he told me about triality and the exceptional groups. In "week90" I described how you could get the Lie groups G2, F4 and E8 from triality. I didn't know how E6 and E7 fit into the picture. He emailed me, saying... When I asked him where he got this, he said he cooked it up himself using the construction of E8 that I learned from Kostant together with the Freudenthal-Tits magic square. He gave some references for the latter.

Another octonion expert is Tony Smith. He too has a far-out but fascinating theory of physics involving octonions! I wrote about his stuff in "week91". I had never met him before the Corvallis conference, but I instantly recognized him when I met him, because there's a picture of him wearing a cowboy hat on his homepage. It turns out he always wears that hat. He is a wonderful repository of information concerning octonions and other interesting things. He is also a very friendly and laid-back sort of guy.

Conversations with Tony Smith and Thomas Larsson have been making me think more about the biggest exceptional Lie group, that magnificent 248-dimensional monstrosity called E8. This plays a significant role in string theory and some other attempts to wrap everything we know about physics into a big, glorious Theory of Everything.

And, as James Dolan just noted today, and Tony Smith seems to have known all along, there's a way to draw the Fano plane that even looks like the diagram Klein and Fricke used to build the Klein quartic."

Jeff, how can you seriously think of Tony as someone who's work should not be in the Archive? Again why is Garrett Lisi not only there but is the most downloaded paper while the model most like Garrett's is not allowed on the archive? John Baez gets lots of useful stuff from Tony, that stuff should be located at the Archive not just Tony's website!

As John Baez said, Tony is friendly and laid back. His recent legal work was giving free legal help to a black church being bullied in his area, he's a great guy, much better than me actually, I grit my teeth, he just gets depressed.

I think the big 5 is better defined than string theory. I also think there's a way to relate all useful physics models to string theory and way to relate all useful personality models to the big 5. That's just me, you can obviously have your own opinion. I just think my papers are scholarly enough to be where they are and I think Tony's are scholarly enough to be in the archive. Obviously not every paper is going to be correct. Plenty of papers get proven wrong later but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have been in the archive.

By the way just cause John Nash had mental problems does not mean his work wasn't scholarly. Even if you think Tony has mental problems (and he does, depression) that doesn't mean his work isn't top notch. Like John Baez said, don't be fooled.

-- John G.

quote:

"You'll also find frequent references on the forum to the "Big Five" psychology books, which are extremely helpful tools towards acquiring a basic understanding of your own "machine". Should you decide to explore those books at some point in the future, Laura suggests that they be read in the following order: The Myth of Sanity by Martha Stout; The Narcissistic Family by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman & Robert M. Pressman; Trapped in The Mirror by Elan Golomb; Unholy Hungers by Barbara Hort; and In Sheep's Clothing by George K. Simon."

John,

I haven't read any of these, but it sounds like I probably should! I did read a little of Jeff's link on narcissism and a related link on borderline personality disorder and it was kind of disturbing, because it reminded me a little bit of people I've known in the past...not you, though!

--Linda

quote:

Originally posted by Raksha:
I haven't read any of these, but it sounds like I probably should! I did read a little of Jeff's link on narcissism and a related link on borderline personality disorder and it was kind of disturbing, because it reminded me a little bit of people I've known in the past...not you, though!

Linda, I've just read the stuff on the forum and on their website, they weren't sending that note when I was new (it's actually one of the links they send you after your first post). I did find out a couple monts ago from one of the moderators who lives in Tucson that the books are availabel via library loans here so I probably need to do that too.

-- John G.

Here is Tony's guest physics blog post after Garrett Lisi's model came out:

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/20...sualizing-e8-physics

-- John G.

OK I'm thinking that maybe it will be simpler to start with Garrett Lisi's much more known model since it has a Wikipedia article and Jeff seems to have a problem with Tony's site (even though John Baez loves Tony's site!).

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...Theory_of_Everything

ToE=E8
graviweak=so(7,1)-------------------strong=so(1,7)-------------fermions=3x(8x8)
gravity+frame-higgs+electroweak----strong+B-L+new bosons-----8s+gen1,8s-gen2,8vgen3

It says: He notes that the second and third generations of fermions do not obviously have the correct quantum numbers in this model—and that this stands as the least understood aspect of the theory, and the largest outstanding problem.

Tony actually does the more conventional thing here and has a single fermion generation (and has the 2nd and 3rd as composites of the first). The 8s+ and 8s- are thus matter and antimatter for one generation. The 8v which for Lisi is very illegal for fermions, is still a little unconventional for Tony since it is an emergent spacetime, it's becoming more conventional though:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2004...d-emergent-time.html

8v being 8-dim means Tony has a Kaluza-Klein model while Lisi does not (just 4-dim for Lisi).

Tony also moves the electroweak part in with the strong part (that's more conventional too) which gets rid of Lisi's new aka unknown bosons. Both Tony and Lisi use MacDowell-Mansouri for gravity but for the frame-Higgs section Tony uses Finkelstein's unimodular relativity.

Not sure why Lisi got more popular than Tony, maybe people just like surfers better than lawyers.

-- John G.

Here's a 3D image (cross your eyes) for how Tony separates the strong (two equilateral triangles aka the Enneagram's law of 3) from the electroweak (hexagon aka the Enneagram's law of 7):

John,

Is it okay if I look at these links tomorrow? I'd really much rather be doing this than what I've been doing for the past few hours, which is posting on the Israel thread on the News forum. The bleeping Israelis will be the death of me! And yet precisely because of his arrogance and stupidity, Netanyahu may have given the cause of peace a better chance than it's had in years. Maybe you've heard the saying, "it was worse than a sin; it was a blunder." That applies in spades here. Also the equivalance of "crisis" with "opportunity," as several of the Jewish peace groups I subscribe to have already pointed out. That applies too.

I love these graphics and really do want to study them and check out your links--after all, I started this thread! But right now I'm so tired and disgusted and demoralized I can't see straight.

--Linda

quote:

Jeff, how can you seriously think of Tony as someone who's work should not be in the Archive?

Why the push to get something in the Archive? The Archive is supposed to be a repository for preprints of papers that will appear in peer-reviewed journals. Why not go directly to the peer-reviewed journals instead of trying for DECADES to get something into an open archive?

People aren't judged by peer reviewers--it's their work that's judged. There are dozens--maybe hundreds--of peer-reviewed journals. Have ALL rejected ALL of Tony's papers? Doesn't that tell you something about the quality of the work?

You keep talking about Lisi as if his work is accepted by mainstream physicists. It isn't. Here:
http://blogs.discovermagazine....heory-of-everything/
one physicist shares my attitude about such works:

quote:

The paper seems to involve a novel mix-up between internal symmetries and spacetime symmetries, including adding particles of different spin. This runs against the spirit, if not precisely the letter, of the Coleman-Mandula theorem. Okay, maybe there is a miraculous new way of using loopholes in that theorem to do fun things. But I would be much more likely to invest time trying to understand a paper that was devoted to how we can use such loopholes to mix up bosons and fermions in an unexpected way, and explained clearly why this was possible even though you might initially be skeptical, than in a paper that purports to be a theory of everything and mixes up bosons and fermions so casually.

So I’m sufficiently pessimistic about the prospects for this idea that I’m going to spend my time reading other papers. I could certainly be guessing wrong. But you can’t read every paper, and my own judgment is all I have to go on. Someone who understands this stuff much better than I do will dig into it and report back, and it will all shake out in the end.

This attitude annoyed another physicist because Sean admits he hadn't read the paper. So this other guy actually read the work, found one basic flaw that invalidated the rest:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~di...archives/001505.html

Finally, you quote John Baez favorably. But John Baez called Lisi a crackpot too. And he gave a great way of determining that.

quote:

The Crackpot Index
John Baez

A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics:

1. A -5 point starting credit.

2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.

3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.

4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.

5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.

6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.

7. 5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).

8. 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".

9. 10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

10. 10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.

11. 10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)

12. 10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.

13. 10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.

14. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.

15. 10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".

16. 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.

17. 10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".

18. 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

19. 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

20. 20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index. (E.g., saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.)

21. 20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.

22. 20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

23. 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.

24. 20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.

25. 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.)

26. 20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it.

27. 20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".

28. 20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".

29. 30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)

30. 30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.

31. 30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).

32. 30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum, or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory.

33. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.

34. 40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.

35. 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.

36. 40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)

37. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.

Sorry for long quote here. Here's a post that scores Lisi by that criteria:
http://angryphysics.blogspot.c...c3475532269863164429

It's almost like Baez constructed his list thinking of Lisi...

Tony's works score pretty high also!

Jeff

Hey cool. I had never heard of arXiv.org before. I'm looking at a paper posted there called "A student's guide to searching the literature using online databases" The link is http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.0931

I read Pd Ouspensky's Fourth Way in the 70s. It was all about Gurdjieff. Very heavy stuff.


Holy Bhagworm

quote:

Originally posted by CompGuy:
Why the push to get something in the Archive? The Archive is supposed to be a repository for preprints of papers that will appear in peer-reviewed journals. Why not go directly to the peer-reviewed journals instead of trying for DECADES to get something into an open archive?

Tony's only reason for publishing is to make sure his work lives as long as possible. He's a lawyer, he doesn't need to publish for job reasons. In Tony's view the archive is likely to have a better chance of lasting longer than any particular journal and have a larger readership than any particular journal.

He did in 1991 I think go for a peer review journal for something and there were some not related to the physics itself problems like it being a compilation of Tony's previous short papers so that kind of totally turned Tony off to journals. More hassles and less readership and less survivability equals Tony going for the Archive.

quote:

You keep talking about Lisi as if his work is accepted by mainstream physicists. It isn't. Here:
http://blogs.discovermagazine....heory-of-everything/
one physicist shares my attitude about such works:

Well yes as I said Lisi has problems, Tony has no problems with Coleman-Mandula or chirality or bosons vs fermions or any other of the problems that Lisi has. Lisi is championed by Lee Smolin, that's major league endorsement. Physicists disagree with each other and that includes the well known mainstream physicists disagreeing with each other.

That's kind of my point that if Lisi is in the Archive with the most downloaded paper of all time, Tony should at least be in the Archive too. Tony's court case was not based on the rules of the archive, it was based on the selective enforcement of those rules.

quote:

Finally, you quote John Baez favorably. But John Baez called Lisi a crackpot too.

Well since you call Lisi (in spite of Smolin's endorsement and the most downloaded Archive paper) a crackpot and think Baez calls him one too then I guess I'm not so upset about you calling Tony one. I guess my arguement with you should be if Crackpots like Lisi are allowed in the Archive, doesn't Tony have a good legal case for being in the Archive too!

There's a guy named Lubos Motl who calls Tony, Lisi and even Smolin a crackpot but he's still one of my facebook friends. Motl has chewed Tony and Smolin and and tons of others including me up really good over the years but I can still converse with him about serious issues like the effects of Jaromir Jagr's girlfirend on his Hockey readiness.

As for Baez's writing about Lisi from

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week253.html

quote:

Garrett is a cool dude who likes to ponder physics while living a low-budget, high-fun lifestyle: hanging out in Hawaii, surfing, and stuff like that. He recently won a Foundational Questions Institute award to think about ways to unify particle physics and gravity. That's an institute devoted precisely to risky endeavors like this.

Lately he's been visiting California. So, before giving a talk at Loops '07 - a loop quantum gravity conference taking place in Mexico this week - he stopped by Riverside to explain what he's been up to.

Briefly, he's been trying to explain the 3 generations of elementary particles using some math called "triality", which is related to the octonions and the exceptional Lie groups. In fact, he's trying to use the exceptional Lie group E8 to describe all the particles in the Standard Model, together with gravity.

I'd like to know if these ideas hold water. So, I should try to explain them! But as usual, in this Week's Finds I'll wind up explaining not what Garrett actually did, but what it made me think about...

But, this splitting of E8:

E8 = so(8) ⊕ so(8) ⊕ End(V8) ⊕ End(S8+) ⊕ End(S8-)

does not correspond to any Z/2-grading where so(8) ⊕ so(8) is the bosonic part and End(V) ⊕ End(S+) ⊕ End(S-) is the fermionic part. There is a closely related Z/2-grading of E8, but it's this:

E8 = so(16) ⊕ S16+

So, right now I don't feel it's mathematically natural to use this method to combine bosons and fermions.

But, only time will tell.

Tony uses that closely related natural grading. Both Tony and Baez prefer a different grading than what is in Lisi's paper, that does not make Lisi a Crackpot. You throw that word around quite loosely so I guess I'll just think of you like Lubos, are you on facebook?

-- John G.

quote:

Well since you call Lisi (in spite of Smolin's endorsement and the most downloaded Archive paper) a crackpot and think Baez calls him one too then I guess I'm not so upset about you calling Tony one. I guess my arguement with you should be if Crackpots like Lisi are allowed in the Archive, doesn't Tony have a good legal case for being in the Archive too!

John,

Okay, let me see if I have this one straight...your argument is that if one crackpot (Lisi) is allowed into the Archive, then it's only fair to allow the other crackpot (Tony) in too!

Did I get that right? I've been following this thread as best I can, even though I've been preoccupied with the News forum and Israel the past few days. I'll try to post something more substantial later today.

--Linda

quote:

Originally posted by Raksha:
Okay, let me see if I have this one straight...your argument is that if one crackpot (Lisi) is allowed into the Archive, then it's only fair to allow the other crackpot (Tony) in too!

Well obviously I think both Lisi and Tony are very good and should both be in the Archive. I'm just saying if someone is loosely using the word Crackpot for even well known physicists like Lisi it doesn't make sense to outlaw Tony who has a model very very much like Lisi's (Tony is thanked in Lisi's paper) just because Tony isn't well known. It's especially senseless cause Tony has fixes for Lisi's known problems.

Having known problems does not make you a crackpot, Lisi even mentions the most complained about problem right in his paper. He calls it something that needs to be worked on in the future. Physicists do this all the time in papers (they love having things to work on in the future). Baez and Tony both offer the same better math for Lisi so it's not like there isn't something known that Lisi can look at.

Lee Smolin also offers ideas for Lisi to use. Smolin, Baez, and Lisi are all well known people in the Loop Quantum Gravity community. All the people calling them crackpots would be in the string theory community. Loop quantum gravity is the biggest competitor for string theory so this crackpot name calling is all a political thing.

Tony by the way thinks of the loop in quantum gravity as being the same as a closed bosonic string. Smolin used to be more into string theory too, one of Smolin's bosonic string theory papers is a favorite of Tony's. Tony also likes a bosonic string theory paper from Susskind, a well known string theorist. There's just too much politics.

That crackpot index of John Baez's is mainly toungue in cheek by the way, since for example when string theory and loop quantum gravity are put through it, they both come out highly crackpotish (String theory being a tiny bit more crackpotish):

http://physicsbuzz.physicscent...tum-gravity-and.html

-- John G.