It would come up to the 30th story of the Sears Tower, covering most of Illinois with saltwater. Of course, exactly this thing cannot happen here and now. But other big things can. Maybe the worriers about global warming have a point. . . . They each talked about random matrix theory and its relation to other topics in physics and mathematics, including quantum gravity, the Riemann zeta function, and integrable systems.
Some explanations are in order.
This zeta function is one of the central elements of pure mathematics. It is defined in terms of prime numbers, and it has an infinite number of zeros arrayed along a line in the complex plane. There are formulas that enable one to translate statistical information about the spacing of zeros into knowledge about the spacing of prime numbers, and vice versa. The random matrix idea grew out of Eugene Wigner's investigations of the highly excited states of nuclei. A nucleus is too complex for us to even give an accurate representation of its Hamiltonian.