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Gary - thanks for the good thoughts, much appreciate the opportunity to share.
a brief aside - Does your comment appear properly formatted on your screen? On mine it seems all the carriage returns have been taken out and replaced by the letter 'n'. Have seen this elsewhere as well, in both the same and slightly differents contexts. A bug floating around somewhere, my impression so far is it enters via the fqxi gui. Broken links there work when accessed directly from chrome, and at the same time this phenomenon arose this formatting bug appeared.
Pasted that to Brendan, perhaps he has had other reports.
re the math, but of course the math is there, all that is needed to do the physics. One is required to take the geometric product of two Pauli algebras, of two Pauli wavefunctions. That gives the geometric structure of the physicist's S-matrix. Having the history is essential to the understanding. Perhaps to your mathematician's mind that doesn't qualify as 'doing the math', no argument here with such a view. Just took what I needed for the, nothing more. Have vague idea what quaternions and octonions are, but never played with them, so no real sense. So far don't see the need for the physics I want to do. Which is mostly condensed matter at this point. Practical stuff. Quantum impedance matching in quantum computing. So far mainstream appears to still be ignoring this, tho one never knows. No different than classical, gotta match to get the bits to move.
Brings to mind your mention of Hamilton/Grassman dispute. New to me, thanks for this. Got a good url?
imo your basics plus Maxwell is all you need to understand what Michaele and I are doing. It is just geometry plus fields. You have the geometric algebra, and the fields are just E and B. No connections in your head to undo.
gotta pause, gonna post and run. Will come back to eqns 4, 5, 5.1, 5.2,...