numberometries

I haven’t ever become obsessed with making sense of the distribution of primes. I do, however, spend about 0.003% of my idle time advancing this half-baked hypothesis that the prime numbers represent the intersection of our world’s concept of natural numbers with the True Numbering System of the Universe. Like, we think of our numbers as this pure straight line through mindspace, with an equal distance between adjacent numbers, but maybe we only perceive one dimension of what is really a gnarled twisting line weeding its way through a space of much higher dimension. So maybe the prime numbers represent regularly, deterministically occurring points (or planes, etc.) distributed in the True Numbering System of 14 dimensions or whatever, and only seem random when seen plotted on our jagged little ‘natural number’ line.

Maybe like mass warping space-time giving rise to what we perceive as gravity, the multidimensional natural number line (of which we only perceive one dimension) is in a kind of “numeric freefall” that gives rise to oddities like the importance of pi and e and the distribution of primes, the cause of which would be obvious if we were to perceive the other dimensions.

And maybe there are experiments one can do to determine if that is indeed the case analogous to how the ant on the surface of the sphere can find out his 2d walking surface is actually curved along another dimension. The ant can carefully construct a really big circle by marching out an equal radius distance in all directions from a center point, and then measure the circumference. c = 2pi*r, all’s flat, otherwise something’s going on. Perhaps there are equivalent experiments for pure numbers. Maybe prime numbers are the key to those experiments.

So just as there are an infinite number of geometries in which the value for (e.g.) pi changes – like the 2d surface of a sphere – maybe there are infinite ‘numberometries’ in which the distribution of primes change. We might be able to use the primes as a tool to untangle this rat’s nest of a number line we mistakenly think of as being pure and straight, and learn the shape of the underlying numberometry of the universe.

Finally, I think we as a society should be spending far more time being blown away by the fact that one can explain some quantum electrodynamics phenomenon only when you admit that there are subatomic particles popping in and out of existance while travelling backwards in time. How cool is that?