New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.” In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, ...

WORDS can be slippery. That is perhaps even more true in physics than it is in the rest of life. Think of a “particle”, for instance, and we might conjure an image of a tiny sphere. In truth, ...

Cohl Furey explains what octonions are and what they might have to do with particle physics.

The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically ...