Why do people waste Gigawatts of energy on searching for Mersenne Prime numbers?
>>55563682
>Gigawatts
>energy
>>55563682
>not knowing Watts is a unit of power
I bet you've gone to summer school a few times.
>>55563709
>>55563732
not op but isn't power just the act of providing something with energy? Aren't the terms basically interchangeable here or at least very closely related?
>>55563756
Power is energy over time, my dude.
>>55563732
>not knowing that P=E/t
>not understanding that gigawatts can relate energy and time simultaneously
>>55563842
Well ya, an act of anything has a time component implied. You can't "do" anything without taking time into consideration. And isn't time an implied function of what he's talking about? Obviously these people op is talking about are wasting energy over an undefined period of time
>>55563682
It's a better use of energy than your thread is
>>55563682
We're just looking for answers and trying to find patterns. If the physics of the universe contains a universal code or pattern, finding it may help us make and control things in ways never imagined.
Not that I think primes mean anything in that regard, primes are just a logical coincidence though I believe true coincidence is quite rare.
>>55563682
Blue sky research.
>hey Newton, why are you wasting your time worrying about how the planets move
>hey Faraday, why are you wasting time studying this electricity stuff
>hey Euler, why do you care about crossing the bridges of Konigsberg only once
>hey Einstein, this E=mc2 business is useless — why did you bother?
Just because you can't see why it is immediately useful doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. Given how dependent our encryption systems are on number theory I don't think it is a bad idea to let number theorists do their thing.
>>55564063
>primes are just a logical coincidence
Primes are the building blocks of numbers.
And the concept of primes generalises to other algebraic structures too (ideals etc.).
>>55563756
It's like claiming that speed is just the act of providing something with a location.
