Some of my astrophotography is on display at Wilde-Meyer Gallery. It includes two nebulae, Thors’ Helmet and the Dolphin, located in the constellation Canis Major or “Great Dog” that rises during the aptly named “dog days of summer”.
Please see below (or click here for a PDF) describing the details of their location in the sky and astrophotography involved.
Greg Moxness, Tucson AZ
Below are SVG images of output from Pane 1 (Chaos) and Pane 17 (AI) of the VisibLie_E8 visualization tool:
Greg Moxness, Tucson AZ
This is constructed from VisibLie_E8 and uses the Mathematica package Mathgroup. A comprehensive PowerPoint/PDF that gives an overview of the underlying theory and VisibLie_E8 tool capability is in this post.
I think the most well-known (2D) image I’ve created so far (above) is found on Wikipedia’s (WP) math/geometry pages. It is what has been called the Public Relations (PR) or publicity photo for E8, which is an 8D (or 248 dimensional as the math guys count it) geometric object. It has been used in books, papers, math/science conference promotional materials, etc. That WP page also has what many used to consider “uninteresting” – my 3D versions of the same object. E8 is used in various theories to understand how the Universe operates way below the atomic level (i.e. the quantum stuff). I think it is responsible for what I call the shape of the Universe. As others have said, “who knew the Universe had a shape?”
In (very) layman’s terms, that 2D image of E8 looks sort-of-like how the lowly 4D Tesseract cube would look if it grew up into an 8D object, but a bit more interesting. The Tesseract was made (more) popular in the modern Avengers movies. In 2015 before I had ever seen any of those movies, I created a laser etched 3D projection of E8 within a jewel cut optical crystal cube and put a photo of that object lit from below by a blue LED on my website’s main homepage. Someone mentioned the resemblance and I was surprised at the likeness, motivating me to go see the movies.
Another of my more notable math/physics images has to do with the discovery of QuasiCrystals made by a guy, Dan Shechtman, who was ostracized from academia for the “impossible” idea of crystals having rotational symmetries beyond 2,3,4 and 6. He is now a Nobel Laureate. The WP image above is on that QuasiCrystal page as an overlay of part of E8 projected over a picture made from shooting a beam of x-rays at an icosahedral Ho-Mg-Zn quasicrystal. I didn’t actually do that experiment with the x-ray beams, but I did similar ones in my college days on a particle accelerator called the Cockroft-Walton Kevatron – see below for a picture of me (the one with the beard ;–) in the physics lab assembling a moon dust experiment. One of the professors had gotten the accelerator out of Germany after having worked on the Manhattan project.
E8 and its 4D children, the 600-cell and 120-cell (pages on which I have some work, amongst others) and its grandkids (2 of the 3D 5 Platonic Solids, one of which is the 3D version of the 2D Pentagon) are all related to the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio. So that kind of explains why most of my 2D art, 3D objects and sculptures (e.g. furniture like the dodecahedron table below), and 4D youtube animations all use the Golden Ratio theme.
Greg Moxness, Tucson AZ
I discovered an error in the WP article on the Disdyakis Triacontahedron. It seemed the scaling factor for determining the coordinates of the Icosidodecahedron hull was added and changed without any citation references. Since the factor seemed off, I analyzed it using the Koca, Mehmet’s paper and Weisstein, Eric W. “Disdyakis Triacontahedron.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/DisdyakisTriacontahedron.html
Please see this Mathematica Notebook for the results here or the PDF here.
Below is the SVG image of the notebook.
Greg Moxness, Tucson AZ
Updated: 05/11/2023
This post is a Mathematica evaluation of A4 Group Orbits & Their Polytope Hulls Using Quaternions and nD Weyl Orbits. This is a work-in-process, but the current results are encouraging for evaluating ToE’s.
Please see the this PDF or this Mathematica Notebook (.nb) for the details.
The paper being referenced in this analysis is here.
Of course, as in most cases, this capability has been incorporated into the VisibLie_E8 Demonstration codebase. See below for example screen shots:
This is an example .svg file output from the same interactive demonstration:
More code and output images below:
Updated: 05/03/2023
This post is a Mathematica evaluation of important H4 polytopes involved in the Quaternion construction of nD Weyl Orbits.
Please see the this PDF or this Mathematica Notebook (.nb) for the details.
The paper being referenced in this analysis is here.
I’ve added this PDF or this Mathematica Notebook (.nb) which is having a bit of fun visualizing various (3D) orbits of diminished 120-cell convex hulls. The #5 subset of 408 vertices (diminishing 192) is completely internal to the normal 3D projection of the 120-cell to the chamfered dodecahedron. The #3 has 12 sets of 2 (out of 3) dual snub 24-cell kite cells (that is 24 out of the 96 total cells).
Click here to view the Powerpoint presentation.
It shows code and output from my VisibLie-E8 tool generating all Platonic, Archimedean and Catalan 3D solids (including known and a few new 4D polychora from my discovery of the E8->H4 folding matrix) from quaternions given their Weyl Orbits.
If you don’t want to use the interactive Powerpoint, here is the PDF version.
See these Mathematica notebooks here and here for a more detailed look at the analysis of the Koca papers used to produce the results :
Or scroll down to see the .svg images here and here.
Greg Moxness, Tucson AZ
