Tom Caylor wrote:
> I've thought of bringing up the Monster group here before, but I didn't
> think anyone here would be that weird, since I even get "weird"
> reactions to my ideas about the Riemann zeta function. I've noticed
> the connection with the number 26 also. (By the way, for some unknown
> reason in my childhood 26 was my favorite number ;)
>
> In the past I've been drawn to the Monster group and the classification
> of finite simple groups, perhaps for reasons similar to other
> mathematically inclined people. There's just something mysterious
> about the fact that there are only a finite number of classes of this
> type of mathematical object. And yet it is a rather non-trivial
> number, larger than the number of spatial dimensions, and even larger
> than the number of platonic solids, or the number of faces on the
> largest platonic solid. And when you look at the order (size) of the
> largest of the finite simple groups (the Monster group), it is huge.
> And yet it is the largest. This seems to be a signpost that something
> fundamental is going on here.
>
> On the other hand, if I recall correctly without checking, rings and
> fields don't have such a classification such that there are a finite
> number of some basic type of them. I'm just shooting off at the hip,
> but I wonder if this has to do with the fact that groups have only one
> operator (addition or multiplication, say), whereas rings and fields
> have at least 2. This rings a bell with the sufficient complexity
> needed for Godel's Incompleteness Theorems (and a nontrivial G/G*?). A
> similar point is that there are an infinite number of primes, whereas
> the number of classes of finite simple groups is finite. Another
> caution is to note the failure this approach in the past, notably with
> Plato's "theory of everything". We don't want to go down the path of
> numerology, which is a lot of what comes up when I google "monster
> group" and "multiverse". But on the other hand, this is part of the
> nature of exploring.
>
> Tom
i.e. "some amount of weirdness" (where have I heart that phrase before?
Ah, yes, Bruno's UDA paper) is to be expected as part of the nature of
exploring.
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Received on Wed Sep 27 2006 - 18:17:25 PDT