Volume 5: Pages 56-60, 1992

Nature's Unnatural Numbers: An Octonion‐Based Extension of the Dirac/Clifford Algebra and Dirac/Maxwell Equations

James D. Edmonds Jr. ¹

¹Physics Department, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana 70609 U.S.A.

The four antiautomorphic conjugations of the Dirac algebra are extended to the octonion‐based form of 2 × 2 matrices. (This is possibly a physics‐based approach to the exceptional Lie algebras.) Again, “ten‐space‐time” emerges in a natural way, even more naturally than the Dirac algebra's “ten‐space” structure. A QED (quantum electrodynamics) in ten‐space is proposed.

Keywords: Dirac algebra, quaternions, octonions, QED, strings, ten dimensions, Clifford algebras

Received: June 11, 1990; Published Online: December 15, 2008