Prime Recap

09/12/2025

It seems Viv has inherited an intelligence that will be deeply unappreciated by the education system.

This morning’s discussion with Viv began with prime numbers, and ended with a demolition of several centuries of mathematics and philosophy.

I told him that some numbers cannot be divided by anything but themselves and one (to give an integer), and that no one really knows why primes behave the way they do.

He listened carefully, asked a few practical questions, and then suggested that the whole thing is pointless; numbers aren’t real, humans invented them, and that’s why they don’t make sense.

It is difficult to argue with Occam’s razor when deployed by a seven-year-old. It appears he has not yet been trained to mistake complexity for reality.

To him, “three” is only a word we use to describe a set of fingers, or biscuits. If the language is inconsistent, that is not evidence of cosmic mystery but a flaw in the design.

We like to pretend mathematics was discovered, not invented, because it flatters us to imagine we have glimpsed the machinery of the universe.

Viv is not impressed. He sees arithmetic as a tool, no more mysterious than a hammer, and if a tool misbehaves, you either fix it or chuck it.

That outlook will probably last until they teach him algebra, where the machinery becomes baroque enough to fool most sceptics, by design.

For now, he is satisfied with the insight that numbers are stories humans tell about counting, and that some of the stories are stranger than others.

I am satisfied too: there is no better reminder of how thin the line is between knowledge and faith than a child refusing to accept that 3, 5, and 7 are mysterious but 9 isn’t.

-h-

I like to think there’s an alternative quantum-like number system lurking out there. Noting that quantum physics and chemistry both collapse to classical theory in the limiting cases, why not maths as well?

I think it’s stupid that we use classical maths to describe quantum theory. It’s shoving a very square peg into a round hole, and no wonder it’s hard to follow.

Just as quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics for large quantum numbers, this hypothetical maths would reduce to ordinary arithmetic and calculus in the macroscopic limit.

Maybe primes only seem mysterious because they’re artifacts of the framework we use; features of our chosen mathematical coordinates rather than of reality itself. In a deeper structure, they might be irrelevant or invisible.

Or, as Viv says, numbers may just be projections of human cognition, a linguistic framework imposed on reality, rather than features of the universe itself.