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My second try: The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that a description of the properties exhibited by the peculiar panoply of forces and particles of reality may be so accurately depicted by eight-dimensional numbers called “octonions.”

I’d go a little farther and modify it as The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that an accurate description of the properties exhibited by the peculiar panoply of forces and particles of reality may be so easily derived springs logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called “octonions”, that one could characterize the description as springing logically from them. ... just to clarify properties of reality do not spring from numbers, although numbers can be used to refer to reality.

“forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers” Remind anyone of the Pythagoreans? I do think discovering the abstractions which are math that we can use to help describe and predict reality, the referent of the abstraction math, are great and wonderful. But we should always keep in mind what the relationship of math, thought, and abstractions to reality actually is.

In Oak Park IL on Thursday the 11th, a rare chance to hear the music that inspired We the Living in the building that inspired Roark's Stoddard Temple: http://www.utrf.org/operetta-in-exile/