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The case against geometric algebra (2024)

alexkritchevsky.com

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Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#141
post #73
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I wrote " GA is considered a kooky, crackpotty sideshow..." I didn't mean I consider it to be... , I mean, it is the case that it is considered to be... . I guess I'm surprised if you haven't run into this? I'm not sure, but it's am impression I've gotten online for a long time. And if you read many of the older Hestenes-era writings you can't help but get it yourself. I agree about the importance of alternative…

I hear authors mention it sometimes. But, I don't see the examples or evidence. Maybe I'm just not on the math departments enough.

Eh. If you can read Hestenes or the Cambridge papers without some red flags going off, then this is just a subjective thing you're not gonna understand and we'd best not try to litigate it :p

(more extreme examples can be found on the heaps of GA-based papers, youtube videos, and comment sections around the internet, but I think the original papers do contain some of the concerning stuff on their own)

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#142
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comes from exterior algebra on its own, it's the k'th exterior power of the metric. Best not to conflate that with GA (unless I'm misunderstanding what you're talking about).

IIRC there's a fairly natural positive definite quadratic form on GA (used as the canonical norm) that takes the scalar part of the geometric product of a multi-vector and its reverse. On the other hand, there's the k-th exterior power of the metric where one asks that wedge/interior products be adjoint in order to extend the metric to higher-degree forms. I was under the impression that these metrics are the same, b…

The two should be the same up to possibly some factors of k! depending on your definitions.

Just as an example, suppose you have two multivectors (abc) and (xyz) with all the vectors orthogonal (for simplicity). The geometric product

(abc)(xyz)

has its scalar part created by

(abc)(xyz) = (ab) (c.x) (yz) = (c.x) (ab) (yz) = (c.x) a (b.y) (z) = (c.x) (b.y) (a) (z) = (a.z) (b.y) (c.x)

You can see how the dot product (which uses the metric internally) is being applied "in-to-out" : the adjacent terms are dotted, at which point they become commuting scalars; then the next terms, etc. Which, frankly, is dumb. This is why the GA version of a scalar product has the "reverse" operation involved... because the GP is doing this in-to-out thing, the scalar product has to undo it by defining (abc) . (xyz) = (abc) (xyz)^~ = (abc) (zyx) = (a.x) (b.y) (c.z), with ^~ meaning reverse.

Whereas the standard exterior algebra inner product is always left-to-right, giving

(abc).(xyz) = (a.x) (b.y) (c.z)

IMO the GA version is a mess because it's conflating two concepts. When the GP works, it is composing operators, so AB = A ∘ B. But the inner product, at its core, is more like division---it wants to have (a).(a) = 1, since its job is to say say "how many copies of (a) are there in (a)?" To make this work for multivectors (ab).(ab), it needs to be left-to-right. GA does in-to-out to copy quaternions with their i^2 = -1, but that's not necessary -- i^2 = -1 follows from the fact that for a rotation, R ∘ R = -I, so it is composing two rotations, not measuring one in terms of the other. Really i^2 = -1 should not be interpreted as a dot product at all. This is very clear when a metric is involved: R_xy ∘ R_xy = -I is a degree-two tensor which transforms with two factors of the metric, whereas (xy).(xy) = 1 is a degree-zero tensor, a coordinate-invariant scalar. They are just different operations, which happen to overlap in simple cases.

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#143
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah! If you do it would probably would need to be a followup rather than addendum

Well, I think my points in the parent article here do stand (I'm aware that you do not). The fact that there is a good interpretation of the geometric product in some cases does not obviate the fact that everyone's writing crappy intuitive things about it. Anyway it has always been my stance that there is a _good_ version of GA, and people need to figure out what it is and write about that instead of bloviating about…

Very sorry to hear about the brain fog, that's rough. Best of luck getting through it.

> in some cases

What cases do you have in mind?

> why are these your operators in the first place?

This is a perfectly reasonable question but I want to point out that it's a bit philosophical and not the kind of thing physics undergrads tend to enjoy hearing about. For example Clifford algebras like matrix algebras are associative algebras over commutative fields (real or complex numbers) - why? Why does the universe like that? I can hazard guesses but it's mostly above my paygrade, possibly above anyone's paygrade. But if it's to be asked of GA it should be asked of matrices too, I'm sure you can agree.

There's something that distinguishes Clifford algebras from matrix algebras. They start from the assumption that vectors anticommute when they're orthogonal. That's easy to explain. It says that if A and B are orthogonal vectors then A->B is the opposite (negation) of B->A.

Aside from those the last thing is that you say your basis vectors have a certain "metric" on them. There's deep philosophical questions about why the universe cares so much about metrics, but they're not at all specific to Clifford Algebra.

Personally I find that very intuitive, much more intuitive than any other tensor algebra I'm aware of.

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#144

I'm a GA researcher. I did this livestream of my reaction to the article https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2282548167 TLDR it is quite a bad article. One of the closest thing he has to a real argument is "I don't like it when geometric objects are identified with operators, I want those to be separate things". But this is both anti-GA and anti-Lie-Theory. As he says, he is critical of mathematics as conventionally practiced…

>TLDR it is quite a bad article

You can write a rebuttal to address what's wrong with the article, from your point of view. Maybe I'm old but the whole "live reaction in twitch" thing doesn't help how the scientific community perceives your area of expertise.

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#145

I'm a GA researcher. I did this livestream of my reaction to the article https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2282548167 TLDR it is quite a bad article. One of the closest thing he has to a real argument is "I don't like it when geometric objects are identified with operators, I want those to be separate things". But this is both anti-GA and anti-Lie-Theory. As he says, he is critical of mathematics as conventionally practiced…

>TLDR it is quite a bad article You can write a rebuttal to address what's wrong with the article, from your point of view. Maybe I'm old but the whole "live reaction in twitch" thing doesn't help how the scientific community perceives your area of expertise.

You're certainly correct that it would be the done thing in physics (and I have written a draft for my blog).

But note that Geometric Algebra is significantly a tool for graphics/game developers, who tend to prefer videos (even the older generation I think)

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#146
post #44

I found this article pretty confusing. And my comment ended up being pretty long, so I will TL;DR it: 1. The social critique doesn’t match my experience and seems under-supported? 2. The technical critique is interesting, looks like a mix of good points, and some that need more work put into it. I think GA is legitimately cool in my opinion, but if there are better abstractions, we should find/define them and use the…

You are correct and this is another failing of the article. Hestenes has very little relevance to the field today - the Atiyah/Penrose school, via Jon Selig, is much more influential. To be fair the article would have been correct ten years ago, but not now (sorry Alex!)

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to make it clear that I wasn't arguing against your main point, that was made very clearly, just against a comparison you used that I think was a bit slanderous (tongue in cheek). Yes, obviously Tau is correct, and that's a better comparison to use. Having dived deeper into the essay, author claims that some of the new notation is obviously better (clifford algebras) and the rest is overzealous unification th…

I'm a bit pressed for time, but one annoyance I've had with the classic "greek" physics notation is that they represent things from "both ends" of a graded vector space. So for example, they start with a scalar, then a vector, then ... pseudoscalar-1, and finally the pseudoscalar. It's a shortcut useful only if you need to scribble on paper and your wrists hurt from writing too much, but it obscures the underlying ph…

Thanks. Claude tells me the essense of this example is "the GA formula for rotation works in 4D (vs quaternions), and to do something like rotation in kD you need a tuple of two objects of different grades because cross-product is a hack that only happens to work in 3D because the high-grade object there is degenerate, and to do 4D special relativity you need 4D rotations".

Is this more or less in the right direction to keep exploring?

Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've become more and more curious about GA after bumping into it when learning a little 3D programming for fun. I'm looking to learn more, wondering if it would help my understanding of physics. Do you have any resources (books, videos, etc.) you would recommend to someone wanting to learn?

If you want to learn physics from a geometric viewpoint, GA is brilliant. Here's a playlist of my stuff, which is aimed at computer graphics folks: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9a8DfUJQcuA9AXqvjxYolq5-... Leading up to classical mechanics, you have the sibgraphi tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSPBzvBkYjxrsTOr0KLDilkZ... (I also recommend the bivector discord if you want a community) And from th…

Thank you so very much, I'll definitely check them out!
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