Dr. Gell-Mann and Mr. Rubik…
When A.B. Carolan was writing Mind Games, he was torn between various names for a principal character. Should he call the android cop Olivaw, Rebus, or Rubik? Rebus won, in honor of Ian Rankin’s inspector.
But both Olivaw and Rebus are cops, so Olivaw fit the bill in that sense. Daneel Olivaw was Asimov’s android detective who worked with Elijah Bailey in the sci-fi mysteries Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. Given that Mind Games is part of the “ABC Sci-Fi Mystery Series” of books written by A.B., that was another plus for using Olivaw. But I’d honored Daneel in Rogue Planet, so I told A.B. that would be two honorifics, which seemed excessive.
Rubik was an alternative because of the famous cube that became such a fad. It’s really a monument to logic and reason and could be an iconic representation for AI. The android in Mind Games is a walking AI and part of an AI network serving to augment a planetary police force.
I was reminded of Rubik’s cube recently for two reasons. One was my observation that Ms. Ginger Zee, GMA’s weather person, was wearing a dress that consisted of square patches with the same color scheme as the cube—garishly strong but happy colors that looked better on the cube than on her (sorry, Ginger). Just my opinion, of course. I’m no fashion expert.
Many see the cube as a game, but there’s math lurking in its twists and turns. There aren’t many simpler structures in advanced algebra than groups. You have one basic operation (like multiplication or addition—let’s write it as *) and one inverse operation in a group, and the group can either be finite, like the one describing Rubik’s cube, or infinite.
The Rubik’s cube’s group is constructed by labeling each of the 48 non-center facets with the integers 1 to 48. Each configuration of the cube can be represented as a permutation of the labels 1 to 48, depending on the position of each facet. Using this representation, the solved cube is the identity permutation which leaves the cube unchanged, while the twelve cube moves that rotate a layer of the cube 90 degrees are represented by their respective permutations. The Rubik’s cube group is non-commutative because a*b isn’t the same as b*a—doing two sequences of cube moves in a different order can result in a different configuration.
So Mr. Rubik, the inventor of the cube, has a personal relationship with group theory. I do too. During the summer (I think I was going into my sophomore high school year), I tutored the elderly lady next door in symbolic logic (the seventy-year-old needed to pass a course in it to receive her philosophy degree at Fresno State—she did). At the same time, I began to peruse a book my brother gave me on group theory. I soon learned that groups are magical. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional rotations are examples that are easier to envision than Rubik’s cube operations. The first is commutative, the second is non-commutative (mathematicians also call those Abelian and non-Abelian, respectively, after the famous Norwegian mathematician Neils Henrik Abel).
But there’s more to the magic than just the two above examples. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann just died at 89 and is responsible for group theory becoming so important to particle physics. He connected group theory to physics in a more fundamental way than through rotations, showing that a whole zoo of fundamental particles, including protons and neutrons, can be classified by elementary constituents using the special unitary group SU(3). The three is for the dimension; group elements can be represented by three-dimensional complex matrices. They can be “generated” by eight linearly independent Hermitian matrices (Hermite was another famous mathematician) as in the equation U = exp( i H). This led to Gell-Mann’s coining the phrase “Eightfold Way,” a bow to Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. But he didn’t stop there, making a connection to literature by calling the tiny constituents of particles “quarks,” a name he borrowed from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. SU(3) is the symmetry group used in quantum chromodynamics, a field theory for that zoo of particles and their constituent quarks in the same sense quantum electrodynamics is for photons, electrons, and positrons.
All this mathematical and physical magic was created in the latter decades of the twentieth century. It represents a confluence of math and science not seen earlier. And Rubik’s cube also represents all this math and science history for me too.
A.B. still chose Rebus for the android’s name in Mind Games. Maybe he or I will use Rubik as an android name in some future story.
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Comments are always welcome.
“Clones and Mutants Trilogy.” This sci-fi thriller series begins with Full Medical, a tale about clones created in a secret government lab. To what end? Evil Agenda follows one clone and introduces the mutant Serena, biologically engineered to be a super-soldier by an evil genius. For what purpose? No Amber Waves of Grain concludes the trilogy with the evil genius of the first two books joining the clones and mutant to do battle with another evil genius who wants to destroy all the West’s grain crops. You will find these ebooks on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.). Load up your e-reader with them for exciting summer reading.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
