[extropy-chat] What is mathematics REALLY?

[Marc Geddes]

What actually *are* numbers? Here's a very interesting quote from a leading
mathematician posted on his web-site:
 "As far as I am aware, no *general* explanation has been put forward as to
why this should be happening - *i.e.* why elaborate concepts, structures and
phenomena developed and studied by physicists, such as thermodynamic
partition functions, quantum harmonic oscillators, spontaneous symmetry
breaking, 1/*f* noise, Hagedorn catastrophes, pion-nucleon scattering, The
Fokker-Planck equation, the Wiener-Khintchine duality relation,
*etc.*should all be somehow relevant to the purest of pure
mathematical structures
- *the sequence of prime numbers*.

However, some months *before* I became aware of any of the various material
compiled in the above-mentioned archive, an image emerged out of my
dream-consciousness, and turned into one of the strangest ideas ever to have
entered my mind:

*In some previously unexplored context, the familiar 'shape' of the sequence
of prime numbers is the result of a kind of dynamic or evolutionary process."
*
**
*http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/isoc/briefintro.htm*
**
**
How on earth could the sequence of prime numbers be 'the result of a kind of
dynamic' you may ask. Here's a possible clue:
 "...For years, physicists discontented with the paltry three dimensions of
space that our senses offer us have been merrily adding extra ones to their
equations. First there were four, then there were nine. The best bet today
appears to be ten dimensions of space, with seven of them curled up so
tightly that we can't see them.

Time, on the other hand, has been largely left alone by the theorists. One
time dimension is all you need, they say. Add any more and all hell will
break loose. But in the past couple of years all that has changed. One
daring physicist-Cumrun Vafa from Harvard-has discovered that an extra time
dimension could solve more problems than it creates."

http://pvanhove.home.cern.ch/pvanhove/PopularScience/NewScientist/hypertime.html

**


--

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Science, Sci-Fi and Philosophy

---

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

-Emily Dickinson

'The brain is wider than the sky'
http://www.bartleby.com/113/1126.html
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