I Can Do Serious! Can You?

Sucking up the human race.
Get James Burke on the case.

It sounds like this guy just beat Banksy to it.

How serious do you want today to be? I think that today should be spent thinking about whether there is any easily distinguishable pattern to Prime Numbers. I know that there isn’t but like perpetual motion and the ultimate answer, everyone thinks that somewhere there must be. If there is a pattern, does that blow all our encryption processes? Maybe there is a particular shape or spiral which determines primes. I just thought of the first few primes and without ever consciously learning them, their ‘primeness’ is just obvious. If only the pattern was that clear. This is like Rudy Rucker’s description of sometimes being able to imagine the fourth dimension. I’ve tried that many times and though it sometimes seems like I can see things that must be at right-angles to everything else, it always turns out to be just another view of our standard 3-dimensional world. I did manage to see it for a few seconds while watching a rotating hypercube on an episode of Horizon but seeing it one minute and then not being able to see it was so frustrating. Now the web has the ability to show you rotating hypercubes but I have never managed to ‘see’ the reality again. Of course there are people whose real jobs are to work out everything that you can possibly know about Prime Numbers, after all, Governments might fall should public key encryption get destroyed by a short cut to factorising numbers, but it nice to think that all you need to play with them is the grey, gooey stuff behind your eyes. I suppose a pencil and paper might be useful as well.