More Pynchon than Thompson, though your joke was nostalgic…:

“Against the Day”,
Page 566

In a dream…

This passage, describing Kit’s dream of Umeki and the message it conveys, pulls together many of the main themes of Against the Day, tying things together in a way that Pynchon seldom does, almost as if he’s providing a rather large piece of the puzzle to help the reader understand the novel:

“Deep among the equations describing the behavor of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an intinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety…. Within the mirror, with the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark intinerary, the corrupted pilgrim’s guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist.”

See references in Against the day also at:

Aether
55; 58; 132-133; 140; 306; 320; “sounds like light” 426; 458; 557; 565-66; 595; aka Akasa, 613; 620; aka Luminiferous aether ; Wikipedia article on Luminferous aether; 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

Q-weapon
“Quaternion-ray weapons” 445; “intelligence of a Quaternionic Weapon, a means to unloose upon the world energies hitherto unimagined — hidden … ‘innocently,’ inside the w term.” 542; “Unfamiliar with the Tesla system and alarmed by the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields, de Decker’s people naturally conflated this with those recent rumors of a Quaternion weapon…” 549; “as if this mysterious Q-weapon were a common firearm and he hoping the seller would allow him a few courtesy shots [emphasis added]” 557; “alive in Woevre’s hands” 563; “Kit found himself alone with the enigmatic object, back inside the leather case. He slung it nonchalantly by its strap over one shoulder” 564; technical details, 564-565; 784;

Quaternions

130; In mathematics, quaternions are a non-commutative extension of complex numbers. They were first described by the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. At first, quaternions were regarded as pathological, because they disobeyed the commutative law ab = ba. Although they have been superseded in most applications by vectors, they still find uses in both theoretical and applied mathematics, in particular for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations. James Clerk Maxwell first published his famous theory describing electricity and magnetism as a set of twenty equations, but he was later able to reformulate it as four equations using quaternions. Heaviside translated these into four vector equations, the form typically taught in basic physics classes today. Heaviside’s vector version is compatible with Einstein’s special relativity, but the quaternion form is not; 131; 156; 511; 525; Wars, 526, 548; 533-34; 538-39; Quaternionic Weapon, 542; 557; 564; 590; Wikipedia entry; Quaternions at MathWorld; Hamiltonian quaternions at PlanetMath; Finding the site of Hamilton’s inspiration (by mathematical physicist John Baez); Conspiracy-theory takes on mathematical history [1] [2] (by Tom Bearden, promotor of a dubious free energy machine); Primer on quaternions and their history

vacuum
60;

Vector
156; In mathematics, a vector space (or linear space) is a collection of objects (called vectors) that, informally speaking, may be scaled and added. More formally, a vector space is a set on which two operations, called (vector) addition and (scalar) multiplication, are defined and satisfy certain natural axioms. Vector spaces are the basic objects of study in linear algebra, and are used throughout mathematics, science, and engineering. 158; 165; vectorists, 534; and Monotony, 560; “in five dimensions” 675

Quintessence and dark energy may involve a phase of the vacuum state, or at least this is what I suspect. In fact dark matter might be local changes in this phase. So called phantom energy might also be such a phase, though its amplitude or probability in the universe I think is near zero.

Lawrence B. Crowell

“There is nothing in the world more helpless and compactified than a man in the depths of an aether binge. . . .”

You do realize that most scientists do exactly what you want them to do? And in fact, so do most physicists?

I would probably take up that bet if it was possible for it to be settled in my favour! Why do you have such great confidence in the existence of extra dimensions?

where f_4 contains the so(3,1) for gravity and the so(4) for weak interactions with so(4) = su(2) + su(2) for the left and right handed parts. CP violation leaves the left su(2), but we have no analogous handedness breaking in QCD. Then to balance everything out maybe large scale compactification in an S-duality sense leaves generates a tiny mass field —- the axion, and there is a dual field which compactifies on a tiny scale ~ near L_p. This would “balance” the role of CP violation in the gravitation plus weak F_4 sector with the hypercharge plus QCD G_2 sector.

Lawrence B. Crowell

http://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/Pics/string_theory.png

Scientists used to look at something in nature that we had not understood, like light for instance. They would come up with ideas about how it would work, then go to observation to confirm and calculations for exactness. Now we go from calculations to theories and back again, veering so far from observable reality and the other steps, primarily confirmation before continuing, the result is nonsense. I know all of you mean well (I’m not saying all of these people are wrong) it’s just the process of coming up with raw theory is not science.

Oh. These genetics posts did seem kind of weird. I thought it was just me–turns out that you weren’t really you.

http://www.genetics.wisc.edu/faculty/profile.php?id=98

The other issue I think at first glance is that while its true the zero modes might spread out and average out over space in the infinite volume limit, it probably need not be true for V finite. Also, it would be nice to to reconstruct the solution for a nontrivial metric with compact 3D spacial topology (say a closed FRW universe).

But if you have physics that generates the operator coupling your Lorentz-violating vector to the kinetic term of your fields, wouldn’t you tend to expect to also generate operators coupling it to other terms? It just seems a little unnatural. And if it appears in front of other terms, it really can play the role of a large coupling.

In particular, why doesn’t one run into intractable nonperturbative physics whenever this coupling is much greater than 1?

(I think Bars calling his program two-time physics is a little tongue in cheek, certainly there is no additional physical time direction there, one of the time directions is always gauge fixed. Allowing thisd extra redundancy is useful mathematical trick though.)