Michael Levin

And so if you're a biologist and you say, so why is that?

And then you get this explanation for, well, it's because they're trying to be off cycle from their predators.

Because if it was 12 years, then every two year, every three year, every four year, every six year predator would eat you when you come out, right?

So

And you say, okay, okay, cool.

That makes sense.

What's special about 13 and 17?

Oh, they're prime.

Uh-huh.

And why are they prime?

Well, now you're in the math department.

You're no longer in the biology department.

You're no longer in the physics department.

You're now in the math department to understand why the distribution of primes is what it is.

Another example, and I'm not a physicist, but what I see is every time you talk to a physicist and you say, hey, why do the, you know, leptons do this or that or the fermions are doing whatever, eventually the answer is, oh, because there's this mathematical, you know, this SU8 group or whatever the heck it is, and it has certain symmetries and these certain structures.

Yeah, great.

Once again, you're in the math department.

So something interesting happens is that there are facts that you come across.

Many of them are very surprising.

You don't get to design them.