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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Reading Past the End: The Knotted Universe


While completing a lecture I stumbled upon Robert Scharein's thesis:


which along with its companion software:


enables one to generate knots:



This is knot the end. Think of milk drops. Think of cymbals. Think of resonating loops or 'strings' as in Brian Greene and String Theory. Can a string ring in different modes? Can a knotted string be ringing in different modes? Two such modes, orthogonal?

I can build a circuit or structure that will ring in several modes. But can a circuit be knotted? A loop antenna exists at the electron level and at the macro level. Such loops communicate by radiating and receiving photons. Knotted fields of energy. Perhaps deeper issues in physics, space-time and dimensionality are connected via knots.

Knots appear in organic chemistry. Left-handed glucose gives cells energy. Right-handed glucose is useless, unless you live in a world that is the mirror image of our own.

Knots appear in DNA storage on histone coils where multiple levels of recursion enable a six foot strand in each cell.

Proteins that fold correctly function properly. There are protein folding diseases. BSE (Mad Cow), Alzheimer's, Huntington's Chorea and even cataracts.



The issues of three dimensional correctness are covered with amazing clarity and brevity in this knot thesis. Knots are symbols with structure and meaning, flying all around us.

There exist symbolic algebra, symbolic geometry and symbolic topology.

Understanding how the three relate will make life easier for the implementers and students of same. Thus a rudimentary understanding of them is essential in the set of thinking primitives we require. 

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