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I just finished reading Mario Livio's The Equation That Couldn't be Solved, a great book that straddles my two favorite genres: science and biography. The title refers to the problem of the quintic equation, one step beyond the familiar quadratic and a mathematical mind-boggler, along with the lives of two young men who got a handle on it then died at ridiculously early ages.

What's interesting about the quintic (five-based) and anything to do with odd numbers in general is that odd numbers aren't symmetrical and symmetry is an essential requirement in the universe. I've skated around this issue many times in previous posts, particularly my War of the Worlds series in which I pointed out that tripods can't walk.

It's a natural follow-on to my previous post about evolution when one considers the concept of how many legs the octopus will have next (or had before.) We don't know yet but there's one thing of which we can be damned sure: it won't be nine or seven or eleven or any odd number. It's no coincidence that there are no seven-legged animals or that humans have two ears. The laws of the universe just work that way and lead to crazy concepts such as quantum entanglement, teleportation and tachyons. These ideas are nutty but what the hell... they're symmetrical which gives them a better shot at being possible than if they were based on odd numbers.

posted by C. J. # 11:17 AM