On proposals

Every year I try to get funding for things that I'm personally interested in but which may not have any immediate economic benefits.  A couple of years ago, after reading Penrose's "Road to Reality", I thought about applying Clifford algebra ideas to fracture mechanics and wrote up a proposal to that effect.  The proposal wasn't funded, but I think the idea is worth exploring.

The summary of the proposal was

" Dynamic fracture processes are associated with crackling noises. These acoustic emissions have
been studied since the late 1930s. Experimental evidence suggests that the energy associated with
such emissions is power law distributed which indicates scale invariance over a range of length
scales. However, a complete theoretical understanding of cause of this scale similarity continues to
be elusive because of difficulties in the dynamic simulation of interacting cracks. We propose to
develop a theoretical and numerical framework for dynamic fracture mechanics using Clifford
algebras. The numerical framework will be used to explore the causes of scale invariance in
acoustic emissions."

The extended abstract and references are attached.