Primes Are Energy Levels: The Montgomery-Odlyzko Conjecture
In October 2024, the largest known prime was discovered — 41 million digits, found by a GPU cluster. But the deepest prime story is not about record-breaking numbers. It is about a 1972 teatime conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study, a pair correlation formula, and the suspicion — numerically confirmed to extraordinary precision — that the zeros of the Riemann zeta function are the energy levels of an undiscovered quantum system.