(spoilers for The Locked Tomb up to & including Nona the Ninth.)
So I was desperately trying to get a grip on quarks for unrelated reasons, and to my utter shock:
Okay, so the obvious referent for the Eightfold Word in TLT is also the Buddhist Eightfold Path. The Lyctoral Megatheorem is an eight-step process pitched to the Lyctors as a path to ascension, so it seems super likely that's the allusion Jod is making.
As much as Jod's propaganda & image is so spiritual/religious, he and the Lyctors were, at heart, theoretical scientists trying to crack the fundamental energy relationships between the components of soul & body.
How like Jod, the megalomaniacal scientist, to co-opt the term Eightfold exactly like a real-world physicist already did when studying elementary particles. (Also Jod would probably know what a quark is lmao.) An allusion to an allusion, maybe?
Some notable similarities:
^^ The real-world eightfold way was an almost-there model, short of the complete solution--just like the Lyctoral Megatheorem that produced the Lyctors, but failed to achieve the mutual immortality of a Grand Lysis or whatever tf Jod and Alecto had going on! Speaking the Eightfold Word is actually where Jod claims Anastasia tripped up, when in fact she was so close to achieving perfect Lyctorhood that he had to stop her.
^^ the eightfold way is an incomplete model in which one of the key failures was not incorporating a NINTH particle into the meson organizational scheme!! Instead, they were arranged as a group of eight and one isolated meson. There's something there about Anastasia being the only failed Lyctor, (and maybe a missing ninth step), but just in general, come on, the Ninth???? Underestimating and neglecting the Ninth House is like, a lethal oversight over and over in the books.
Now, if I were Tamsyn this would all be more than enough for me to use the term, but if anyone who knows more about physics can think of any other similarities I'd love to hear about them!!
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