A 1d Up Approach to Conformal Geometric Algebra: Applications in Line Fitting and Quantum Mechanics

Funder: University of CambridgeAbstract: We discuss an alternative approach to the conformal geometric algebra (CGA) in which just a single extra dimension is necessary, as compared to the two normally used. This is made possible by working in a constant curvature background space, rather than the usual Euclidean space. A possible benefit, which is explored here, is that it is possible to define cost functions for geometric object matching in computer vision that are fully covariant, in particular invariant under both rotations and translations, unlike the cost functions which have been used in CGA so far. An algorithm is given for application of this method to the problem of matching sets of lines, which replaces the standard matrix singular value decomposition, by computations wholly in Geometric Algebra terms, and which may itself be of interest in more general settings. Secondly, we consider a further perhaps surprising application of the 1d up approach, which is to the context of a recent paper by Joy Christian published by the Royal Society, which has made strong claims about Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, and its relation to the sphere S7 and the exceptional group E8, and proposed a new associative version of the division algebra normally thought to require the octonians. We show that what is being discussed by Christian is mathematically the same as our 1d up approach to 3d geometry, but that after the removal of some incorrect mathematical assertions, the results he proves in the first part of the paper, and bases the application to Bell’s Theorem on, amount to no more than the statement that the combination of two rotors from the Clifford Algebra Cl(4, 0) is also a rotor