The eightfold way

There have been lots of questions about Challenge 5B and the eightfold way so I thought we would explain it. The cipher used is just a transposition cipher (also known as an anagram cipher) so the letters of the ciphertext are just the letters of the plaintext jumbled up. To make things interesting we decided to jumble up all the characters including the punctuation and spaces which is why in some places you saw two spaces together. The keyword for the cipher was rainbows, so putting that over the first 8 characters of the text we get RAINBOWS TRINITY, rearranging the columns to get RAINBOWS in alpahabetic ordering we get ABINORSW RIINYT , then the pattern repeats with the next 8 characters. The title "The eightfold way" was introduced by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann to describe the classification of elementary particles. It alludes to the Buddhist notion of the Noble Eightfold Path. It is also the name of an advanced mathematics graduate text book which explores several themes in geometry and number theory, obviously an interest of Ben and Trinity.