A Sweeping Connection between Number Theory and

Geometry.

Abandoning the ancient Euclidean Pedestrian model of “Closeness” in

Mathematical Thought.

In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and

reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of

Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid “Harris-Taylor”—a 288-page book

dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory—in only 37 pages. The

22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most

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complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between

number theory and geometry.

THE ORACLE OF ARITHMETIC WORKS BEST WITHOUT

WRITING DOWN A THING

We focus on this mathematics of Scholze's...which we confess we only very

dimly even hope we understand....at least in terms of its implications.

“Scholze’s key innovation — a class of fractal structures he calls perfectoid spaces

— is only a few years old, but it already has far-reaching ramifications in the field of

arithmetic geometry, where number theory and geometry come together. Scholze’s work

has a prescient quality, Weinstein said. “He can see the developments before they even

begin.”

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 Many mathematicians react to Scholze with “a mixture of awe and fear and

exhilaration,” said Bhargav Bhatt, a mathematician at the University of Michigan who

has written joint papers with Scholze.” It’s because of his unnerving ability to see deep

into the nature of mathematical phenomena.

“Unlike many mathematicians, he often starts not with a particular problem he

wants to solve, but with some elusive concept that he wants to understand for its own

sake. But then, said Ana Caraiani, a number theorist at Princeton University who has

collaborated with Scholze, the structures he creates “turn out to have applications in a

million other directions that weren’t predicted at the time, just because they were the

right objects to think about.”

It appears that in some way Scholze tackles the problems of mathematics by

somehow moving beyond them and directly towards making explicit various

implicit relations that would ordinarily be considered part of the “foundations of

mathematics”. So perhaps that is why he seems to working backwards. Those

“ideas” of his have a status that is meta mathematical that is brought to bear, it

seems to produce results within mathematics.

It is our hope that he is also, at the same time, by delving into foundations of

mathematics, he is not opening new doors for those pursuing those foundations

but that he also might be opened the door to fundamental philosophical

considerations, which have long been snared in what were considered to be self-

evident rituals and formalism going back to the axiomatic framework of Euclidean

geometry

“Scholze set himself the task of sorting out why this infinite wraparound

construction makes so many problems about p-adic numbers and polynomials

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easier. In mathematics, the p-adic number system for any prime number p extends

the ordinary arithmetic of the rational numbers in a different way from the e old

thinking in terms of "closeness" of the Euclidean sort*

“I was trying to understand the core of this phenomenon,” he said. P-adic

numbers are an esoteric and to, the layman outside mathematics, a rather bizarre

notion to which Scholze has apparently added some vital further significance.

These numbers have been known for many years, although not to the general

population.

They, in fact, should, by all rights, not be such a ‘secret” insofar as if we

consider the well known “rational numbers”, there are only two kinds of numbers

which can be generated from rationals, the ‘realsʼ and “the p-adics”. The P-adics

are therefore in privileged and good company and not merely a quirky flight of

mathematical fancy. P-adic numbers were first described by Kurt Hensel in

1897 .The advent of the p-adic numbers was motivated primarily by an attempt to

bring the ideas and techniques of power series methods into number theory. Their

influence now extends far beyond this. For example, the field of p-adic analysis

essentially provides an alternative form of calculus.Yet we for the most part have

no clue about this other class of numbers, and certainly no clue about how they

might reality to our concerns with “reality” or “knowledge of the world”. Just

about everything we generally talk about has to do with the ‘real numbersʼ

Scholze began doing research in the field of arithmetic geometry, which uses

geometric tools to understand whole-number solutions to polynomial equations—

equations such as xy2 + 3y = 5 that involve only numbers, variables and

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exponents. By the time he reached the age of 24, high-level conference invitations

to talk about the uses of perfectoid spaces had enshrined Scholze as one of the

youngest elder statesmen ever of arithmetic geometry, the branch of mathematics

where number theory meets algebraic geometry.

Scholze, in the video interview we include, explains that “most math takes

place among the real numbers…what you are used to from school…Number theory

just deals with the integers…1,2,3, etc…. and we donʼt care about the

Transcendentals like pi…“These systems are based on a nonstandard notion of

where the gaps lie, and which numbers are close to each other: In a p-adic number

system, two numbers are considered close not if the difference between them is

small, but if that difference is divisible many times by p, “ says Scholze. Itʼs a

strange criterion, but a useful one. The 3-adic numbers, for example, provide a

natural way to study equations like x2 = 3y2, in which factors of three are key.”

The p-adic number system for any prime number p extends the ordinary arithmetic

of the rational numbers in a different way from the extension of the rational number

system to the real and complex number systems. The extension is achieved by an

alternative interpretation of the concept of "closeness" or absolute value. In particular, p-

adic numbers have the interesting property that they are said to be close when their

difference is divisible by a high power of p: the higher the power, the closer they are.

This property enables p-adic numbers to encode congruence information in a way that

turns out to have powerful applications in number theory—including, for example, in the

famous proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles.

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 Interview Video with Peter SCHOLZE:

We think readers will find, as we did, the written interview (above) to be interesting…as

it weaves in and out concepts which we only have the faintest glimmer about, but

which it places in a more human context of innovation and excitement.

But in this the video interview we catch nothing less than the young genius

mathematician right out of “central casting”.. He switches on and off right before our

eyes…morphing out of mortal form…as his own eyes shift into focus somewhere else

in another universe…from talking like a nice young kid……to being possessed by

words whose meaning almost no one else on the planet knows for sure yet.

We find ourselves hoping that unlike so many of the great math geniuses he has not

yet reached his greatest work at this early age.

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 For some equations of this type, it is fruitful to study whether they have

solutions among alternative number systems called p-adic numbers, which, like

the real numbers, are built by filling in the gaps between whole numbers and

fractions.

Our minds in todays world have learned to work….at least most of our minds…in

terms of the constraints and falsely presumed “self evidence” of the basic Euclidean

axioms, so called, because they were so obvious they did not require any justification.

In so doing, we have learned to unthinkingly assume that the alternate choosing of

either “rational numbers” or via “reals”, the discrete or the continuous, is not only the

‘natural” way to confront and think about he world but that it the ‘only” way to confront

and think about the world . Of course, that “self evidence” is precisely what demands

questioning of its self evidence; and regrettably that self evidence works, of course, to

preclude such considerations. But every once in a while, someone comes along.

As we note below, that happened with Turing, and he began to open the door to a

new sense of our being in the world. Now, in many ways, we see Scholze as further

pushing that door open. Discussing mathematics with Scholze is like consulting a

“truth oracle,” according to fellow mathematicians, Weinstein. “If he says, ‘Yes, it is

going to work,’ you can be confident of it; if he says no, you should give right up; and if

he says he doesn’t know — which does happen — then, well, lucky you, because

you’ve got an interesting problem on your hands.”

Whatever may be said about our world and our state in it in this current time of

civilization is, we believe, somehow and in some deeper way categorically and

emphatically, an outgrowth of the original Euclidean formulation of how we may

speak about our presence in the world. The so called “geometry” and the way it

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was presented became the backbone of the Aristotelian metaphysics and all that it

has carried with it over the centuries.

Mathematicians had noticed in the 1970s that many problems concerning p-

adic numbers become easier if you expand the p-adic numbers by creating an

infinite tower of number systems in which each one wraps around the one below it

p times, with the p-adic numbers at the bottom of the tower. At the “top” of this

infinite tower is the ultimate wraparound space—a fractal object that is the

simplest example of the perfectoid spaces Scholze would later develop.

With p-adic numbers, on the other hand, we choose to extend the base p

expansions in a different way. Unlike traditional integers, where the magnitude is

determined by how far they are from zero, the "size" of p-adic numbers is

determined by the p-adic absolute value, where high positive powers of p are

relatively small compared to high negative powers of p. P-adic numbers are “far

removed from our everyday intuitions,” Scholze said. Over the years, though, they

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have come to feel natural to him. “Now I find real numbers much, much more

confusing than p-adic numbers. Iʼve gotten so used to them that now real numbers

feel very strange.”

We believe that the standard dogma of “thinking”, the formulative and

foundational metaphysics of our age, which we take for granted to such an extent

that we donʼt even realize that it is a “metaphysics”, and an old one at that…. is a

fairy tale...and that folks like Scholze are the ones capable of helping us, all of us

in the areas of science and philosophy, to see through it. That their work relates

to Fractals is what our skeptical "idiot savant's view of the world would predict.

This makes us optimistic that there is support out there, albeit in realms we

cannot navigate ourselves, for our skepticism about the nature of the concepts of

'space" and time" and how a fractalized view of the universe is MORE fundamental

than the standard, age old Euclidean view...that then became the model for our

metaphysics via Aristotle….and since has become the basis of the way we

all...most of us...."think" of the world, or knowledge, or 'numbers" and of “truth” It

is not surprising at all to us and in fact an aspect of further support for pursuing a

further articulation of an alternate view of the relation between the discrete and

the continuous, the rationals and the reals, that the "p-adic" number approach can

equally well, perhaps better, lead to an alternate way of founding the “calculus"

and, thus, on the levels of the ordinary world where calculus has applied to well,

that p adics could offer solutions that might have additional implications beyond

that we now derive from the use of the “reals” in founding our calculus. “There are

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many parallels between this p adic story and this other story with which we are

more familiar.,” Scholze says in his video, “and it turns out that there are some

different way of introducing transcendentals to the integers which reveals other

information about the integers themselves.”

If we consider that mathematics and the foundations of mathematics have

been locked up inside a Euclidean conceptual cage for more than two millennia it

is not surprising that there is no general formalism for Scholze's ideas. Scholze

set himself the task of sorting out why this infinite wraparound construction makes

so many problems about p-adic numbers and polynomials easier. “I was trying to

understand the core of this phenomenon,” he said. “There was no general

formalism that could explain it.” He eventually realized that itʼs possible to

construct perfectoid spaces for a wide variety of mathematical structures.

These perfectoid spaces, he showed, make it possible to slide questions

about polynomials from the p-adic world into a different mathematical universe in

which arithmetic is much simpler (for instance, you donʼt have to carry when

performing addition). “The prototype for constructing complicated spaces from

simpler spaces is the theory of (topological or differentiable) manifolds in topology

or differential geometry; the simpler spaces are just miniature versions of

Euclidean space of dimension n, and a manifold is defined as a topological space

that "looks locally" like a Euclidean space.

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 “Perfectoid spaces stand at the crossroads where topology, Galois theory,

and the study of equations by means of congruences meet. It's a busy

crossroadsI” (The Perfectoid Concept: Test Case for an Absent Theory”

—-I don’t expect readers to possess any of the technical vocabulary

introduced in the previous paragraph. Each of the technical terms,

however, can be seen as the precise analogue of a familiar notion from

higher-dimensional geometry in Euclidean space”

What the perfectoid spaces do for us....as admittedly bystanders to it all.....is

that they provide a way of "thinking"...not just for mathematicians...but for all of us

in science and in developing philosophical views of the universe. After all, if we

can say that they present a novel way of understanding the relation between the

integers and rationals and the real numbers, surely that is also giving us a glimpse

of the infrastructure of thought —-for considering the relation of time and

"reality"....the discrete and the continuous, which was the problem that Turing was

focussing upon in his last years. The speaking of the world in terms of

domains….of domains, for example, of the discrete and the continuous, strikes us

as grossly inopportune.

When we look at the way our brains function, they seem to have an

extraordinary way of moving back and forth in regard to the brainsʼ “minding”,

sometimes expressed in terms of the discrete or the digital, and sometimes

expressed in terms of the continuous or the analog. These are no domains at all,

they are modes of expression.

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 Then when we ponder that our brains are organized entities within which the

entire system must somehow achieve coordination on a neuroscience level, we

have to wonder how it manages to sustain two such inextricably related but

nonetheless seemingly independent modes of expression as it does in its alternate

reliance on either discrete or continuous modes of narrative.

If the brain can conduct itsʼ “minding” in this way, and as we much assume, in

some fashion that is syngergistic and coordinated, then the relations of which

Scholze speaks must somehow lead to a narrative that allows for fluid conversion

between the two modes of speaking. That is to say, there must be some harmony

in nature, at least minimally within our human nature, as exemplified by our brainʼs

operations between the the two modes of expression.

“The weirdest property about perfectoid spaces is that they can magically

move between the two number systems,” Weinstein said. "Moving between

number systems" may be the way mathematicians refer to it, but for us it is moving

to a new cosmology and metaphysics...replacing the previous pedestrian

separation between number systems ,established a novel relation between time

and space, just as surely as it replaces the relation between integers and

continuously differentiable spaces.

Less likely things have happened before in the history of mathematics. It

truly seems like mathematicians often come up with mathematically compelling

new forms of expression decades and even centuries before physicists or other

scientists come to realize that those formulations are applicable. And then that

realization and implementation precedes, in turn, the awareness by the society of

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the force of those mathematical notions to alter their own everyday view of the

world that they live in.

We may be considered more "idiot" in holding to this belief of ours than we

are considered "savant'...and surely many would agree with the estimate of our

ideas as being those of the former...but we cannot help but thinking of the

Mandelbrot sets when we hear these mathematicians speak....since those sets

pretty much are nothing more than the translation of these mysterious numerical

relations...without any existent formalisms to even approach formalizing them.....in

visual terms that present in our visual space of colors.

So we thus see patterns of continuousness that arise from incredibly complex

underlying numerical calculations, when those rates of changes of numerical

values are “translated” into various colors of the spectrum to be available to us as

visual and beautiful patterns. The displays of the Mandelbrot sets trigger in us the

recognition of Arthur C Clarke, in his video presentation on the Mandelbrot set and

its meanings, that we will paraphrase here:

“The Fractal geometry presents us with an alternate and new type of

geometry. We can look at Euclidean geometry as being opportune and well

suited only to describe that which is ‘man-made”, but if seek to do justice

to the world of nature, we have to explore the newfound power of fractal

geometry.”

Euclids notions and the entire tacit presuppositional structure which those

notions carried with them worked well enough in ancient Greek times, suitable for

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agriculture and building tables and chairs, and then for the construction of a wide

range of “machinesʼ of all sorts, all of which could be well handled by Euclidean

geometry and its favored son, Newtonian Mechanics and the achievements of man

made products that led to the Laplacian determinism, and the understanding of

the universe as running very much like a “clock”. However if we look at nature, as

it has been embodied by the study of organisms or medicine or any forms of life,

the tacit but nonetheless operative Euclidean framework of ideas in which we have

operated has made the understanding of “life” a problem.

Of course, the understanding of other organic processes such as those

attributed to “mind” and ‘consciousnessʼ has been a similar problem Indeed

everywhere we look our world is not ‘man made” and thus likely not amenable to

Euclidean thinking and most importantly not amenable to the tacit ‘axiomatic

dogmas” upon which it is based. We, of course have not known what to say about

snowflakes, or flowers or the clouds or the winds or anything related to “nature”

on our planet. Let us include on the ledger side of nature, as well, the gamut from

galaxies and black holes to photons and electrons and quarks and so on. These

are not “man made”, but aspects of nature.

So taking Arthur Clarkeʼs point to heart, if we consider that Euclidean

geometry is only one approach to the world and one that has insinuated itself into

all our thinking about the world or our own place within it, why should we not

expect to find reward in the exploration of the fractal geometry with which we are

becoming acquainted, especially in the understanding of “nature”…and with it

“life” “mind” and even black holes and photons. These are all “nature “ and not at

all “man made”.

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 Where ”Closeness” is not defined by smaller distance…but by a patterning of

of operations of P-adic nature …. for us that means that “time” and the instant

need not be unthinkingly and reflexively definable by “smaller distances” either …

and that thus there is something New in the World…..The concept of "TIME" itself

is potentially here being reborn

We must admit to wincing every time we hear someone in physics or other

sciences…or even worse, in philosophy, speak of the “instant”. We find ourselves

stunned to realize that, if their lives depended upon it, they could not make clear

at all….or even for an instant….what they might mean by the use of the term

“instant”. Yet, the reliance upon the notion of the “instant” is the great divide

between the experience of continuity and duration of the river of time, on the one

hand, and the experience of the isolation of the discretely defined droplets of that

river , on the other hand.

Do we really believe that we can understand the concept of ‘the instant” as

some “itzy, bitzy teenie weeniest “stretch of time….do we come by it that way….as

an infinitesimal. That is what we have believed since Euclidʼs era. But what if an

instant can contain more than we can possibly imagine…and indeed, that is not

saying nearly enough, since by definition the instant can contain no happenings at

all. Zeno was not far from the truth when he presented Aristotle with the paradox

of how you can cobble together instants where nothing can happen to yield up a

finished occurrence, or event in the world of happening. Our science relies, for

the most part, on fabricating a ‘notion” of instant, by means of some never clear

definition in terms of just how much minimization of distance in time passage is

required to justify the use of the notion of “instant”. In fact, the instant as used is

15
not defined in any way more sophisticated than precisely “when nothing

happens”…and what that “when ‘ might be is left to the imagination.

Scientific theorizing then cobbles together a presumption that if two such

instants are considered then we can indeed, much like Euclid, be able to draw

some straight line between them, or, draw some conclusions about what

happened between those two privileged oases of “non happening”. We call them

oases rather than “moments” precisely because they are not properly considered

as points anywhere along that line of time, but are more like ‘oases” the sense of

being mirages in the minds of the observing scientist. Whereas the claim we are

making here…on the basis of how we see the term “instantʼ used is that it is of use

precisely because it refuses to grant the possibility of ‘happening” except

somehow “between” instants..(although “between” does not imply a closeness in

the sense of distance between ‘points in time” we now as instants, but some other

aspect about which we believe Scholzeʼs theories will eventually tell us

The reader may be a bit puzzled at our using the “instant” in a manner which

is not tied umbilically to the minimization of distances along a space like “line” of

time passage. However, to illustrate the usage, which is far more widespread than

we might suspect, we can point to either Alan Turing or Charles Darwin, both of

whose narratives rely on a notion of ‘instant” that is liberated from the prevailing

Euclidean geometric pre suppositional base.

As we consider their work here, only ever so briefly to highlight this tragic-

comedy of the misconstrual of the “instant”, we have to realize that here, in

productive scientific theorizing, and, indeed, among the two most productive

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narrative produces in the last several centuries, what a relief it is to not here

someone butcher the sensibilities of the inquiring mind by speaking of “taking a

slice of time” or of ‘freezing time at an instant” and presumably “looking aroundʼ

or, as physics has found much to its ongoing current frustration and

disgruntlement “observing” of any kind that presumably can be associated in the

same sentence with the notion of “instant” as defined in the ancient Euclidean

modeling..

One has to ask…though seemingly no one ever does…”what in the world

would it mean to speak of ‘observing” something within the ‘instant” or “at an

instant?”….if one took that “slice” or “froze time”. The instant is nothing more than

a way of speaking of “gaps”… between our various efforts to speak of “happening”

or of “observing”. Of course, in accordance with that way of speaking of the

“instant”, then the “length” or distance measure by means of which we arrive at

the use of the notion of ‘instant” would not be relevant at all. But that is not to say

that this ‘gap” would not be amenable to treatment via another more sophisticated

way of determining “closenessʼ. Since the achievement of closeness between

chunks of narrative about world would seem to be a rather positive aspiration..

Now, both Turing and Darwin as they developed their narratives, both indeed

had some remarkableʼ gaps” that their particular “instants” afforded them the

luxury of utilizing. For them the “instant” as we refer to it “as a gap” was a

constructive “moment” that allowed the organization of a cogent narrative, but

was not a “momentʼ of the sort at which anything was ‘observed” or “observable”

because it was defined as a gap , within the guidelines of the constructing o fa

potent in our ability or inclination to speak of “happenings”. We must

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parenthetically note here that the predicament of the positioning of talk of the

“observer” by modern physics in some relation to the antediluvian notion of

“instant” must be somehow related to their paradox plagued efforts to actually

speak about the many achievements that present themselves*

For Turing, his story of the “Turing Machine” directly embodies a progression

of “typings” or outputs that are predicated on a “tape” which is of unspecified

length and potentially “infinite” and which simply is defined as advanced from

section to section of the tape as a roll of paper would through a printing device.

The flow of the tape is not at all ‘within” time and is not measurable as having any

“rate of movement” It is “timeless” in an interesting and novel sense. Turing

cannot say ..and is not interested in saying….what might happen between the

presentation of each successive section of the tape for “reading” and typing”.

What happens happens only within the particular segment of tape, and again there

is no “when” that applies there.

Turing, of course, can achieve this formulation precisely because he is not

discussing events on the level of depiction in space and time that a typical

Euclidean geometric narrative would entail. He is only providing a schema by

which to speak about “intelligence” in this ideal “Machine” which is anything but

an actual machine, since those are very much constrained by Euclidean time and

space measures.

Seemingly far from Turing is Charles Darwin and the mode of speaking which

other knows as Darwinian Theory and which we prefer to call “Darwin-Speak”. We

have that preference because for us Darwinian theorizing (in its original form as

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put together by Darwin) is very similar to “Darwin acting like a Turing Machine”.

What we mean by this is that Darwin had rather realistic awareness of his

limitations as an observer and of the limitations of both the evidence that might be

found in some Euclidean modeled theoretical landscape. For him, the equivalent

of the “instant” was the ticking of the ‘generation clock”.

This progression known as “reproduction” was simply a succession of

generations. Each such ‘tick” was posited as beyond the narrativeʼs reach in

terms of “what happens”. The generation of any species, at whatever lifespan it

might have had and whatever assemblage of events it might have contained in

stories told about it was not situated in any particular time flow. It was defined as

succession in much the way Turingʼs machineʼs operation was.

What happened was due to the time between instants…and instead of the

tape being typed upon in Turing, we have the output of behaviors etc during the

particular section of the species ongoing existence. These outputs were possible

for consideration and discussion only between the instants of reproduction.

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Darwin thus did not have to consider any detailing of the evolution…as a point wise

trajectory…as a Lamarckian theorizing would have to have done. It was sufficient

that with each advance of the “tape” the “Fitnessʼ of the species was perpetuated

in order to allow it moving on to the next segment of “tape”. So here too we have

the use of the “instant” as defined only in terms of another level of consideration

beyond the illusion that it arises through some scrutiny of a line of time passing

and results from a measure of minimal distance. The instant, for Darwin as for

Turing, is outside the Euclidean world viewing of distance and time measures.

One of the direct consequences of this mis-construal of what we are

speaking about when we are speaking about “instants” is the inability for those

working in various different theoretical paradigms to communicate with each

other. Or, we should say, that, while they think they are communicating as all good

theorists and scientists must, they are actually speaking at utter cross-purposes

and in terms of supposed “interactions” in their respective domains which do not

allow of a narrative whereby those “interactions” can be related in a coherent

narrative to those occurring in the other domain. We see this everywhere in

science, whether it is the inability for developmental systems theorists to come to

some rapprochement with evolution theorists, or whether is with those engaged in

neuroscience theorizing to come to some coherent narrative relating to behavior

and events in the domain of psychology.

What is behind this chatter that only leads to more chatter and fails to lead to

n integrated “view” incorporating both paradigms in question is the blithely

accepted assumption that an “instant is an instant is an instant”, and the non

recognition of the fact that these choices of ‘instantsʼ as gaps of discontinuity

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between separate sequence of happenings is not one to be made lightly or

frivolously and that it, in fact, creates a gulf between viewpoints. The failure to

flew “instantsʼ as choices by the narrator/observer and not as slices of time

predisposes one to the illusion that since all theoretical science ventures are

“about the world” they must all speak of happenings within the same absolute

time.

The “instants” that are chosen when time is thus frozen or sliced are thus

presumed to all be able to intermingle with the narratives of some “combined”

reconciliatory paradigm….linking perhaps development of organisms during their

lifetimes with the evolution of their species population over evolutionary time or

linking events in the brain of the organism within their limited set of interactions

with events in the behavioral/social world observed by psychologists or

ethologists.

But what is forgotten is that the basic “theory” is based upon the choice of

“instants” as its essential foundation and thus different narratives cannot be laid

side by side along a common spectrum of absolute time. What we say that we can

talk about “happening” is a direct function and a necessarily specific consequence

of what we, as theorists, define as the gaps between our speaking of happenings

that are founded in the idiosyncratic notion of the ‘instantʼ relied upon in each

particular scientific paradigm.

Our further model of "TIME" as a fractalized concept entails an analysis of

Turing to a level which helps confirm...broadly speaking ...the validity of this new

21
view....where by "closeness" is not defined by any metric of distance...but by

divisibility. In this regard we do not see the two major slices of our intellectual

world today provided and articulated by Turing are happenstance or independent

concepts. The narrative of the Turing Machine as an Intelligent Being operating

within the mode of discreteness and the narrative of the morphogenesis of life

forms as a mode of differential equations in terms of ‘continuousness” were, to us,

two sides of the same coin, or, perhaps in terms of Mandelbrot, merely a closeup

zoom of one domain within another domain. If we think about this....in our own

"naive" way we can see that this is possibly a "statement" which implicitly alludes

to the notion of "time" as defining the relation of "Things" in the world rather than

a geometric spatially primitive notion based on rationals...somehow relating to

"reals in a way that would be forced to fit with a two thousand year old naivety of

Euclid and the other ancient Greeks.

ag

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 Scholze, as his co workers tell us, avoids getting tangled in the jungle vines

by forcing himself to fly above them: As when he was in college, he prefers to work

without writing anything down. That means that he must formulate his ideas in the

cleanest way possible, he said. “You have only some kind of limited capacity in

your head, so you canʼt do too complicated things.” Yet even with the benefit of

Scholzeʼs explanations, perfectoid spaces are hard for other researchers to grasp,

Hellmann said. “If you move a little bit away from the path, or the way that he

prescribes, then youʼre in the middle of the jungle and itʼs actually very hard.” But

Scholze himself, Hellmann said, “would never lose himself in the jungle, because

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heʼs never trying to fight the jungle. Heʼs always looking for the overview, for some

kind of clear concept.”

This amazing translation of the grotesquely complicated Godelian proofs

down to the ultimately uncomplicated narrative of the Turing Machine, too, was

the approach legendarily taken by Turing. But you can indeed do things that might

have seemed very complicated if you had gone about them imprinted with the

conventional indoctrination that acts upon most thinkers in most areas in our

civilization, a captivity that is very hard to shake.

As the Mathematics Review above states in considerably more knowledgeable

detail, ”Category" is the formalized mathematical concept that currently best

captures what is understood by the word "concept." Scholze defined perfectoid

spaces as a category of geometric spaces with all the expected trappings, and

thus there's no reason to deny it the status of "concept." However, the author

emphasizes,

“I will fight the temptation to explain in any more detail just why Scholze's

perfectoid concept was seen to be the right one as soon as he explained

the proofs in the (symbolically charged) suburban setting of the IHES.

But I do want to disabuse the reader of any hope that the revelation was as

straightforward as a collective process of feeling the scales fall from our

eyes. Scholze's lectures and expository writing are of a rare clarity, but

they can't conceal the fact that his proofs are extremely subtle and

difficult.”

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 "I can't even make mathematicians understand what I'm currently working

on," Scholze laughs. After finishing his lecture on the opening day, he tells me,

quite a few colleagues told him that they had given up trying to follow his trail of

thought halfway through the lecture. Does this bother him? Scholze shrugs. "I

don't believe you always have to understand everything in mathematics," he says.

"Gerd Faltings, the only German to have been awarded the Fields Medal, regularly

holds a lecture on arithmetic geometry at Bonn University. I used to go there as a

student and I would never understand anything. But in hindsight I feel like I learned so

much during that time. There's this misconception that certain parts of lectures are

pointless if you don't get it straight away."

“It's Monday, the first day of the congress. Peter Scholze strides across the stage of

the packed main auditorium, clutching a laser pointer, his dark curls tied back like a

professional soccer player. He explains the connection between his recent findings and

the 1968 Fontaine-Winterberger theorem. At the end of the lecture, the audience has no

questions. An old gentleman gets up from his seat and addresses the young

mathematician: "It will take 20 years to prove what you just outlined on the last few

slides. How do you expect to manage that?"

Peter Scholze smiles a crooked smile, scratches his head, and replies: "I have

already thought of some arguments. I don't think it will take that long." Maybe he is more

of a genius than he is willing to admit. So what is next? "There are just a few things I

would like to understand and that I'm thinking about," he says with the grin of a 28-year-

old.

Scholzeʼs work might indeed be rattling that cage in which the thinking of

even our best and brightest minds has been confined for centuries in more ways

than one...and letting some revolutionary aspects of our views of the world escape

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into expression in mathematics new formalisms. Perhaps we are being naive or

too optimistic in feeling that he brings to bear a view that is so distinct from the

older accepted “axiomatic “embeddedness of our scientists and philosophers that

his work may reflect on these questions of how we formulate our theories of

science themselves.

Our civilization has so unsuccessfully grappled with coming to terms with

how we speak about time, while, on the other hand, we seem to have so easily

glided into absolute and utterly total belief in our mode of speaking about space.

The illusion of satisfaction on the one hand compared with the frustrations on the

other have actually led much of our speaking about time to be patterned after and

unthinkingly coopt modes appropriate for speaking of space.

We cannot fail but see just about everywhere the discordance which afflicts

those who seek to speak sensibly about time when they have to try to reconcile

the notions of the ‘instant” and of the “present moment” with that of “duration"

and the flow of time. We have here a situation where the numerical approach to

time via the discrete points that presumably constitute it must be reconciled with

the notion of time as continuous. The issue of the development of a mode of

speaking more aptly about time has also been one of the juggling of the manner in

which we can some speak of the domain of ‘reals” as somehow related to and

generated from the domain the “rationals”.

There seems to be a compellng analogy here that resonates with the aspects

of the problematic of the “instant” to which we have only briefly alluded above.

Indeed, the ostensible “closeness” of the various domains, where those “instants”

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are separately and independently defined, is often found to not be very “close” at

all….and yet we have to hope that there is perhaps an alternate way to arrive at the

force of a calculus of time which provides the merits of our current way of

speaking but also shows the way to new aspects of the ‘instants” that we count

off the clock that will surprise us all The realm of “P-adics”and the fractalized

notions they offer us constitute a way of filling in the gaps between the rationals

with the vast additional realm of the reals. Is not that the basic problem of our

finding a way of speaking about time and the instant??

Changing the way mathematicians “think” is a great start at changing the

way we all “think”….about “everything”.

Just ask Euclid. Or ask Turing.

Each of them spawned a radical revolution in how our civilization “thought”

and thus how it “thought of itself”…… that no one saw coming…and indeed we

have not yet appreciated their impact, for better or worse, even after we are in the

midst of them.

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