E8 - a modern mandala?

- a Buddhist mandala

I've just finished reading/listening to Wheel of Darkness by Preston and Child, the latest FBI Agent Pendergast novel in which he and his ward, Constance, travel to a Buddhist monastery in Tibet. The monks there mention that a mysterious ancient artifact has been stolen and ask Pendergast to retrieve it for them. His quest takes him (and Constance) aboard an ocean liner where they encounter a strange mandala, a creepy tulpa, much violence and destruction (and some sex), before they are able to accomplish their task.

The book, in some ways, is about the mind ..... a tulpa, for instance, is a materialized thought that has taken physical form, like the one in Jorge Luis Borges' book Las Ruinas Circulares ..... and another object in the story is a thangka, or mandala, a painting that's used in meditation to help bring about enlightenment - sort of the Eastern version of the Illuminations of Hildegard von Bingen .... and towards the end of the book, Constance asks Pendergast how just a picture like a mandala can effect a person so profoundly. He mentions in response that research has shown that what we see can actually change the structure of our brains (link) and he brings up a modern example of a mandala - E8.

I have to admit up front that I'm too much of a dope to understand what E8 is, aside from grasping (I think) that it is a multi-dimensional representation of, er, something mathematical. Here's a bit about it from a past BBC news story - 248-dimension maths puzzle solved .....

An international team of mathematicians has detailed a vast complex numerical "structure" which was described more than a century ago.

Mapping the 248-dimensional structure, called E8, took four years of work and produced more data than the Human Genome Project, researchers said.

E8 is a "Lie group", a means of describing symmetrical objects.

The team said their findings may assist fields of physics which use more than four dimensions, such as string theory.

Lie groups were invented by the 19th Century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced "Lee").

Familar structures such as balls and cones have symmetry in three dimensions, and there are Lie groups to describe them. E8 is much bigger .....

"While mathematicians have known for a long time about the beauty and the uniqueness of E8, we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently," commented Hermann Nicolai, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (the Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany.

And here's a representation of E8 ....



I don't know if I'd recommend Wheel of Darkness - there were a couple of icky parts I wish I hadn't read - but it did bring up some interesting ideas. You can read the first chapter of the book here.