WordsThe words
Every term on this site in one place, plain. 18 of 'em.
- Apollonian gasket
- Circles packed into the gaps between touching circles, and into those gaps, forever.
- Circle inversion
- Reflection in a round mirror: a point at distance d from the center goes to R²/d along the same line. Circles go to circles.
- Clustering
- The share of your friends who are also friends with each other.
- Dependent origination
- The Buddha's rule that things come up because of other things: when this is, that is. Pāli paṭicca-samuppāda; Thai ปฏิจจสมุปบาท (patitcha-samupbat).
- Emptiness
- In Madhyamaka Buddhism, the lack of any standing-on-its-own in a thing that arises from others. Not the same as nothing.
- Entanglement
- A link between particles that makes their measurements match in ways no plan made ahead of time explains; it carries no message.
- Hologram
- A recording of light where every piece of the plate holds the whole scene, blurrier the smaller the piece.
- Huayan
- A school of Chinese Buddhism (Kegon in Japan, Hwaeom in Korea) built on the Flower Garland Sūtra; the net is its teaching picture.
- Indra
- The old Vedic king of the gods, wielder of thunder. Sakka in Pāli; Phra In (พระอินทร์) in Thai.
- Indra's net
- A net over Indra's palace, going on forever, with a jewel at every knot; each jewel reflects every other, and every reflection holds all the rest.
- Indrajāla
- Sanskrit, “Indra's net” — and, later, a conjuring trick or illusion.
- Interbeing
- Thích Nhất Hạnh's word for dependent origination: the cloud is in the paper.
- Interpenetration
- The Huayan idea that every thing contains all others and is contained in them, without getting in their way.
- Limit set
- The dust that reflections of reflections crowd toward, reached only after bouncing forever. The lace in the pearls pictures.
- Monad
- Leibniz's simplest unit of what exists; each one mirrors the whole universe from its own spot.
- Māyā
- The world as a dazzling show, easy to take for the whole of what is.
- Small world
- A network where most ties are local but a few go long, so anyone is a handful of hops from anyone.
- Unfolding
- Following a light ray in a mirror room by flipping the room over each wall instead of bouncing the ray; the path turns into a straight line.