What Could Be the Origin of Preferred p-Adic Primes and p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis?

Abstract

p-Adic mass calculations allow to conclude that elementary particles correspond to one or possible several preferred primes assigning p-adic effective topology to the real space-time sheets in discretization in some length scale range. TGD inspired theory of consciousness leads to the identification of p-adic physics as physics of cognition. The recent progress leads to the proposal that quantum TGD is adelic: all p-adic number fields are involved and each gives one particular view about physics. Adelic approach plus the view about evolution as emergence of increasingly complex extensions of rationals leads to a possible answer to th question of the title.  The algebraic extensions of rationals are characterized by preferred rational primes, namely those which are ramified when expressed in terms of the primes of the extensions. These primes would be natural candidates for preferred p-adic primes. An argument relying on what I call weak form of NMP in turn allows to understand why primes near powers of 2 are preferred: as a matter of fact, also primes near powers of other primes are predicted to be favoured.