Two-Dimensional Time
The following is from the Prime Quotes page at the website of Matthew R. Watkins…
“I have sometimes thought that the profound mystery which envelops our conceptions relative to prime numbers depends upon the limitations of our faculties in regard to time, which like space may be in essence poly-dimensional and that this and other such sort of truths would become self-evident to a being whose mode of perception is according to superficially as opposed to our own limitation to linearly extended time.”
J.J. Sylvester, from “On certain inequalities relating to prime numbers”, Nature 38 (1888) 259-262, and reproduced in Collected Mathematical Papers, Volume 4, page 600 (Chelsea, New York, 1973)
by Watkins, is to a bibliography on time and causality. On another page at his site, Watkins says:
Translated into contemporary English, Sylvester is saying more-or-less this:“I have sometimes thought that if we were able to perceive time in some multi-dimensional way, more like a surface than like a line, then perhaps the distribution of prime numbers would be entirely self-evident, and would not seem at all mysterious to us.”
Many thanks to Heckler & Coch (5/19/03) for pointing out the Sylvester quotation.
For related thoughts on this topic, see