Mersenne primes: connection between particle physics and quantum computation?

I found in the blog of Scott Aaronson an interesting piece about Mersenne primes and quantum computation: the title of posting is Why complexity is better than cannabis. I glue the text here.

Whether there exist subexponential-size locally decodable codes, and sub-n^ε-communication private information retrieval (PIR) protocols, have been major open problems for a decade. A new preprint by Sergey Yekhanin reveals that both of these questions hinge on -- wait for this -- whether or not there are infinitely many Mersenne primes. By using the fact (discovered a month ago) that 2^32,582,657-1 is prime, Yekhanin can already give a 3-server PIR protocol with communication complexity O(n^1/32,582,658), improving the previous bound of O(n^1/5.25). Duuuuuude. If you've ever wondered what it is that motivates complexity theorists, roll this one up and smoke it.

I do not pretend of understanding much about this statement but I have the dim gut feeling that the existence of infinite number of Mersenne primes would be wonderful for communications. In any case I can optimistically click the link and try to read the abstract.

1. At the first line of abstract I make a head on collision with "Q-query Locally Decodable Code (LDC)". LDC codes n-bit message to an N-bit code word C(x) such that one can probabilistically recover any bit of the message by querying only q bits of the code words, even after some constant fraction of bits have been corrupted. Error correction seems to be in question. Knowledge of these q bits allow to save all bits. "Locally decodable" has only heuristic meaning for me.

2. Authors assign to Mersenne primes M_t=2^t-1 (t is also prime) 3-query codes satisfying N=exp(n^-1/t) for all values of the bit number n. As Mersenne prime increases N approaches to unity. I guess that the equality is a shorthand for N=P_n(t)exp(n^-1/t), P_n(t) a polynomial.

The reason why I saw the trouble of trying to understand the abstract is that Mersenne primes are in a preferred position in the p-adic world order and p-adic physics is physics of cognition in TGD Universe. I have also discussed generalizations of genetic code at my own primitive level of understanding, in particular codes associated with Mersenne primes and Combinatorial hierarchy M(n)= M_M(n-1) starting with 3,2³-1=7,2⁷-1=127,2¹²⁷-1,?.. defining a kind of abstraction hierarchy of Boolean statements about statements about.....with one statement thrown away at each step. Only the listed candidates are known to be primes. Hilbert has conjectured that the hierarchy continues indefinitely.

The original discovery was that the mass scale ratios for elementary particles seem to be near to ratios of Mersenne primes. Eventually this led to p-adic mass calculations where the prime p characterizing p-adic number field characterizes elementary particle mass scale. It turns out that quite many elementary particles correspond to Mersennes or Gaussian Mersennes (also primes p near 2^k, k prime or even integer, are possible). In particular, Mersenne primes label bosons mediating fundamental interactions: electro-weak gauge bosons correspond to M₈₉, M₁₀₇ to gluons, and gravitons can be assigned to M₁₂₇ defining the largest non-super-astronomical p-adic length scale of this kind.

Also Gaussian Mersennes are interesting. The length scale range between 10 nm (cell membrane thickness) and 2.5 micrometers (size of small cell) contains four(!) Gaussian Mersennes G_k = (1+i)^k-1, k=151,157,163,167. All primes k in this range define Gaussian Mersennes. This number theoretic miracle suggests that also Gaussian Mersennes are crucial for communications and especially so in living matter!

The heuristics is that Mersenne primes and their Gaussian cousins are winners in the number theoretical fight for survival. Maybe the ability to communicate reliably with minimum number of "parity bits" is the key to the success. Mersennes and possibly Fermat primes (very few of latter are known or might even exist) would be preferred since they are so near to powers of two. If the number of Mersenne primes is infinite, TGD would predict infinite hierarchy of exotic bosons and maximally interesting Universe. TGD inspired theory of consciousness suggests that real fermionic partons and their p-adic counterparts form particle and its cognitive representation so that cognition, information processing, and communications would be present already at elementary particle level. Exciting!