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"Morphine," writes Richard J. Miller, "is the most significant
chemical substance mankind has ever encountered." So ancient that
remains of poppies have been found in Neolithic tombs, it is the
most effective drug ever discovered for treating pain. "Whatever
advances are made in medicine," Miller adds, "nothing could really
be more important than that." And yet, when it comes to
mind-altering substances, morphine is only a cc or two in a vast
river that flows through human civilization, ranging LSD to a
morning cup of tea. In DRUGGED, Miller takes readers on an
eye-opening tour of psychotropic drugs, describing the various
kinds, how they were discovered and developed, and how they have
played multiple roles in virtually every culture. The vast scope of
chemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier boggle the very brain
they reach: cannabis and cocaine, antipsychotics and
antidepressants, alcohol, amphetamines, and Ecstasy-and much more.
Literate and wide-ranging, Miller weaves together science and
history, telling the story of the undercover theft of 20,000 tea
plants from China by a British spy, for example, the European
discovery of coffee and chocolate, and how James Wolfgang von
Goethe, the famous man of letters, first isolated the alkaloid we
now know as caffeine. Miller explains what scientists know-and
don't-about the impact of each drug on the brain, down to the
details of neurotransmitters and their receptors. He clarifies the
differences between morphine and heroin, mescaline and LSD, and
other similar substances. Drugged brims with surprises, revealing
the fact that antidepressant drugs evolved from the rocket fuel
that shot V2 rockets into London during World War II, highlighting
the role of hallucinogens in the history of religion, and asking
whether Prozac can help depressed cats. Entertaining and
authoritative, Drugged is a truly fascinating book.
This book naturally follows on from Volume I, developing the
mathematical foundations and physical applications of the
relatively new subject known as Unity Root Matrix Theory (URMT).
The mathematical advances extend URMT's new method of arbitrary
vector embedding to two arbitrary vectors, in three or more
dimensions, by way of a complete reformulation of URMT in terms of
projection operators and exterior products. The similarity of the
resulting matrix forms to those used in quaternions, rotations and
electromagnetism enables URMT to extend its physical applications
to angular dynamics and the electromagnetic plane wave. In
particular, URMT's inherently discrete nature results in a
treatment of quantised particle spin. Armed with a common
mathematical formulation of physical applications as an eigenvector
solution to a matrix operator, all generated in a language more
recognisable to conventional mathematical physics, the path is now
clear for closer future development of URMT to existing, and highly
successful, physical theories.
This book presents an integer-based representation of the quark
flavour model using the mathematics of Unity Root Matrix Theory
(URMT). As per a conventional quark representation, the quarks are
given by eigenvectors to matrix operators, with commutation
relations amongst these operators being those of the symmetry
groups SU(2), for an up and down quark isospin representation, and
SU(3), for an additional strange quark. The URMT method of lifting
then extends this to a full, six-quark model, SU(6). Unlike
conventional physical theory, the work originates in the world of
number theory and Diophantine equations, and is based upon the
invariance of an eigenvector equation to parametric variation in
the unity root matrix - its elements are unity (or primitive)
roots. The quark eigenvectors are Pythagorean or hyperbolic in
nature, and parametrically evolve in both the time and frequency
domain, whilst keeping all their inner product relations invariant,
i.e. the model possesses unitary properties equivalent to the
special unitary groups SU(2) to SU(6). Following previous
publications on recasting physics in the world of number-theory,
URMT has shown, once again, that the physical world may well be
reducible to a simpler scheme that dances to the tune of the
integers.
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