{"id":143059,"date":"2022-07-28T23:07:43","date_gmt":"2022-07-29T04:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/octonions-may-harbor-secrets-of-the-universe"},"modified":"2022-07-28T23:07:43","modified_gmt":"2022-07-29T04:07:43","slug":"octonions-may-harbor-secrets-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/octonions-may-harbor-secrets-of-the-universe","title":{"rendered":"Octonions \u2014\u201cMay Harbor Secrets of the Universe\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/octonions-may-harbor-secrets-of-the-universe.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe final theory of nature must be octonionic,\u201d observed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/11\/obituaries\/michael-atiyah-dead.html\">Michael Atiyah<\/a>, a British mathematician who united mathematics and physics during the 1960s in a way not seen since the days of Isaac Newton.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOctonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses,\u201d Pierre Ramond, a particle physicist and string theorist at the University of Florida, said to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/nattyover?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor\">Natalie Walchover<\/a> for Quanta.<\/p>\n<p>Many physicists and mathematicians over the decades suspected that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called \u201coctonions.\u201d Proof surfaced in 1,898, writes <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/nattyover?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor\">Walchover<\/a> in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720\/\">Quanta<\/a>, that the reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe final theory of nature must be octonionic,\u201d observed Michael Atiyah, a British mathematician who united mathematics and physics during the 1960s in a way not seen since the days of Isaac Newton. \u201cOctonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses,\u201d Pierre Ramond, a particle physicist and string theorist at the University of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}