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This fascination with primes is has, of late, seemed to be a little misplaced to me. Primes emerge as a property of the number system that you have. The number
by saimiam 5y ago
This fascination with primes is has, of late, seemed to be a little misplaced to me. Primes emerge as a property of the number system that you have.
The number system itself is an an approximation of the natural world where actions like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division exist. The natural world in question is, as far as we know today, what we humans observe.
Now, imagine a second world which was excellent at approximations to the extent that their entire Standard model depended on differentiation and integrations. Would they care as much about primes and try to fit everything into “beautiful” math? I don’t know the answer to this but I’ve found this thought experiment useful to put our maths in its place.
- kzrdude 5y agoI don't think we have even managed to imagine a world where the natural numbers wouldn't be a useful building block. That means the natural numbers are a fundamental logical building block of any formal system like mathematics, doesn't matter what the laws of physics are.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- misja111 5y agoI don't see how you could model the world without addition or subtraction. Even if you started out with differentiation, wouldn't addition and subtraction be implicitly defined by it? And once you have those, you have multiplication and division as well, and primes.