pull down to refresh
Thank you @PiHiker, for saving me the time of watching the linked video to figure out how nutritious was the clickbait!
emphasis mine:
[...] the wildest part. Equations that describe how black holes scramble information produce patterns that look identical to Riemann's zeros. Nobody fully understands why. But it suggests the proof might not come from a mathematician with a notebook. It might come from a physicist working backwards from a black hole.
The secret pattern in prime numbers, unlocked by a black hole. Not a bad story.
It is a bad story, unless you hate humanity so much that you believe credit belongs to the shape imposed by operators upon the algebras of equations describing spacetime, rather than... the physicist, mathematician, or kid babysitting the datacentre that shits out a master proof-turd for skeptical verification by people.
Even the word "unlocked" pisses me off in that story. The similar patterns resulting from two different equations aren't lock and key, even though someone who "listens to the music" just right might find that one simplifies the other; however, from the perspective of mortal humans, the vast majority of whom hear only different hues of noise from either phenomenon, they're both locks, and the genius not only knows how to use one of them as a hammer, but also where to hit.
It is a bad story, unless you hate humanity so much that you believe credit belongs to the shape imposed by operators upon the algebras of equations describing spacetime, rather than... the physicist, mathematician, or kid babysitting the datacentre that shits out a master proof-turd for skeptical verification by people.
Wow! no mercy for us laymans
Alright so primes are weird. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11... they just show up randomly with no obvious pattern and mathematicians have been trying to predict them forever.
This guy Riemann in the 1800s built a mathematical machine that seems to track where primes hide. When you run the machine, every so often the output hits exactly zero. Those moments are special. And Riemann noticed every single one of those zero moments landed on the exact same imaginary line, dead center, every time. He couldn't prove it always happens. He just noticed it and reckoned it was always true. That's the whole hypothesis.
Now here's why checking a trillion examples doesn't win the million dollar prize. In normal life a trillion confirmations and you'd bet your house on it. But math deals in infinity and a trillion out of infinity is basically nothing. Math has also been burned before by patterns that held for millions of cases and then randomly broke.
Mathematicians don't want to know that it seems true. They want to know WHY it's impossible for it to ever be false. Like you don't check every triangle ever drawn to prove triangles can't have four sides. You just show that four sides breaks the whole definition of a triangle. Someone needs to write a pure logic argument showing a zero landing off that line is a structural impossibility, not just something nobody's seen yet.
Most mathematicians think that argument is going to need ideas that haven't been invented yet. A 160 year old problem still waiting for math that doesn't exist.
And here's the wildest part. Equations that describe how black holes scramble information produce patterns that look identical to Riemann's zeros. Nobody fully understands why. But it suggests the proof might not come from a mathematician with a notebook. It might come from a physicist working backwards from a black hole.
The secret pattern in prime numbers, unlocked by a black hole. Not a bad story.