Physicists-Speak Up!

...and now for something completely different.Seed Magazine reports that which we who have gone through a Varsity Physics course at Major level already know all too well: that Physicists and Mathematicians should be talking to each other a lot more than is customary.

See, there's this nifty little function called the Zeta function , discovered by Riemann quite a while ago, which when fed integers outputs a 3D graph, the zero points of which turn out to be the prime numbers.

Nice.But what's nicer is that these prime numbers,or zeta function zeros, are not distributed randomly in the 3D space-they line up neat as a motorway though the landscape.Dead straight line.

The core of Riemann's Hypothesis is that the Primes will always fall on this straight line, although of course we don't know that for a fact as we haven't found all the Primes yet.Still it looks fairly credible that they will continue to be found in this straight line and nowhere else on the zeta function graph.
Still with me? Good. For while the Mathematicians were oohing and aahing about this neat trick, the Physicists had produced one that was almost identical in every way-but it was produced by a mapping of the energy levels of any moderately-heavy atom.

Well, that's blown my socks off for the day-and I'm sincerely using no sarcasm here, difficult as that may be to believe.

Thing is, Physics students (serious ones) always learn core mathematics before the serious Mathematics students-they need it to handle most of the ideas in Physics.So Physicists end up having a healthy and practical mathematical ability which, to be frank, Mathematicians tend not to believe anyone outside of their own speciality posesses.
But I could've told you.
Physicists,and Physics students, too, need to learn to speak up outside the Faculty Tearoom-and especially to compare notes with the Mathematicians,and together they may crack some of the keys to undeerstanding.

Oh, and Douglas Adams might yet get that beatification.

He may well have been right about 42 all along.