One of the great physicists of this century is a man named Richard Feynman, who teaches at CalTech and knows as much about the way the Cosmos works as any man alive. Feynman has participated in half a dozen extraordinary theoretical developments and won a fistful of prizes, including the one you get from Sweden. Even so, he likes to tell people that physics has not accomplished as much as some physicists like to brag, and that we are not as close to a great universal theory of matter and energy as some theorists like to think. Indeed, Feynman has said, physicists ought to put a special sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don't know. The message on the sign would be very simple. It would consist entirely of one word, or, rather, number: 137.
One hundred thirty-seven is the value of a number called the fine-structure constant. This constant, 137, is the way physicists describe the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon. Because this is the basic physical mechanism of electricity and magnetism, the fine-structure constant has its own symbol, the Greek letter a, “alpha.”
Now, alpha is nothing more, nothing less than the square of the charge of the electron divided by the speed of light times Planck’s constant. Thus this one little number contains in itself the guts of electromagnetism (the electron charge), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck’s constant). All in one number! Not only that, this number isn’t like the gravitational constant or the universal gas constant, full of meters and kilograms and degrees Celsius. Alpha is a pure, dimensionless number — little wonder that people have been fascinated.
Physicists would like to believe that these phenomena fit together tidily in accordance with one big plan. They would like the ratio of electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics to be a number like one, or maybe two times pi. They do not like its being 137 — a prime number, for heaven“s sake!
The significance of alpha was first spelled out in 1915 by a physicist named Arnold Sommerfeld — at the time, measurement errors made the value closer to 136 — and physics ever since has been littered with efforts to explain it. the most famous attempt was that of Sir Arthur Eddington, a prominent astronomer who believed that such constants could be used to produce a theory of the universe. He built a huge 16-dimensional equation full of these constants and claimed that alpha could be calculated from the number of terms: (162 - 16) / 2 + 16 = 136.
Unfortunately, experiments quickly showed that alpha was really closer to 137. Plucky Arthur Eddington was not dismayed. He said he had forgotten to add one more factor — alpha itself — and made the value 137. For thus, Punch magazine dubbed him Sir Arthur Adding-One. But Eddington was not deterred. Proudly he proclaimed that the firmament contains exactly (137 - 1) x 2256 protons. Of course, the old man may have been right; nobody has yet been able to count them all.
Throughout the Thirties and Forties, the greatest scientists of the day tried and failed to figure out the magic number 137. The great Werner Heisenberg told his friends that the problems of quantum theory would disappear only when 137 was explained, and spent years trying to explain it; fortunately, the problems did go away despite his failure. One of Heisenberg’s friends, theorist wolfgang Pauli, wasted endless research time trying to multiply pi by other numbers to get 137; Edward Teller, now a prominent advocate of star wars, derived alpha from gravitation; and a dotty Japanese showed that the difference in the masses of the proton and delta particle is equal to alpha. All this shows is that there are many ways you can multiply and add a bunch of numbers to get 137. The closest any of these people got to the answer, perhaps, was when Pauli died — in hospital room 137.
The best explanation of the mystery ever given to Victor Weisskopf, another leading theorist from that time, was provided by Gershom Scholem, one of the most eminent scholars of Jewish mysticism. When Scholem met Weisskopf, he asked about the prominent unsolved problems in physics. Weisskopf said, “Well, there's this number, 137....” And Scholem's eyes lit up! He said, “Did you know that one hundred thirty-seven is the number associated with the Cabala?”
After physicists slam into a problem for a few decades, they tend to go into greener pastures. Alpha calculating has been out of fashion for a while. Physics is making progress without it. But it is comforting to know that if you're at a party, and some know-it-all is talking about how great the progress of science is, you can always say, “That’s true, my man. But why is alpha equal to one hundred thirty-seven?”
copyright © 2001 by Charles C. Mann
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Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species
The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition
He also wrote a book about particle physics called The Second Creation (rev. ed., 1996, Rutgers University Press) that discussed 137.
His book, @Large: The Strange Tale of the Internet’s Greatest Invasion was published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster.
A number of Mann“s articles appear elsewhere in cyberspace, including “Brave New World”
These articles were co-authored with Mark L. Plummer:
“Empowering Species”
“Are Wildlife Corridors the Right Path?”
“The Butterfly Problem”
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http://www.spaceandmotion.com/physics-fine-structure-constant.htm
Physics: The Fine Structure Constant
Explaining the Fine Structure Constant with Resonant Coupling of the Wave Structure of Matter in Space
Dear fellows of the WSM team,
The origin of constants in the framework of WSM is a puzzling question that can be put like this:
i) How constants like the fine structure constant, the Planck constant h, the speed of life c, and so, can be embedded in the wave structure of particles, so that they appear the same every time every where?
ii) What is the wave mechanism able to conserve and reveal them when needed?
Let me tell you a fine story.
We assume that the universe is filled with around 1080 particles. The half base 2 logarithm of this value is around 137. And we know that the base 2 logarithm is that of information, particularly when using binary choices.
In our electron model, the emitted out-wave leaves the particle, travels through the universe and comes back as in-wave towards the particle. Doing that, the wave crosses other wave center 'particles' without forcibly establishing interaction with them if phases do not mach. As Milo Wolff put forth in his book Exploring the Physics of the Unknown Universe (p.90), we assume that the wave interacts with the square root of the number of particles in the Universe, be 1040. The wave is slowed down by every encounter. So we can easily assume that the wavelength of the coming back in-wave which carries information is shorter than the emitted one according to the ratio L0/137, L0 being the fundamental wavelength, = c/f0 of the relation:
hf0 = m0c2
If you look at the animation on this page,
http://www.ontostat.com/anglais/phase%20wave%20gb.htm
where the difference between the two waves is L/10, you see that the phase wave passes over the particle, each time the particle has traveled L/10 -I name this one repositioning which occurs with the frequency f. So in our electron case, for every repositioning with the frequency f0, the electron displaces of L0/137.
In the universe, everything is moving and, even for a particle at rest, at every repositioning the new position of the particle is slightly different, distant every time of around L0/137 from the previous position. So, that produces a fuzziness in a certain area that gives the electron the appearance of having this width, the physicists call that its radius R (Milo Wolff, p.132):
R = e2/mc2 = L0/137
and we obtain easily from this formula the elements of the fine structure constant known with this precise value :
e2/hc = 1/137.036
Moreover, as we see again on the animation every 10 wavelengths, the phase wave swells to its maxima; that occurs for the electron every 137 wavelengths. So at that distance, or its multiples, of the particle appears a peculiar, spherical structure where amplitudes are maximal. This structure is able to play a role in electromagnetic interaction between particles.
In the Balmer-Rydberg formula, the Rydberg constant is :
R = me2/4pi hbar3
which can be written as;
e4/(2hbar2 c2 L0)
We find again the square of the fine structure constant, multiplied by the wavelength. This gives the radius of the first orbit of the hydrogen atom and overall explains why it is like that.
This demonstration gives us to feeling of the great power of WSM : providing clear explanations for poorly known physical phenomena; here, a mere difference between the wavelengths of in- and out- waves is sufficient for explaining the mysterious value, 137.036, of the fine structure constant we find everywhere in the particle and as well in the atom.
Great cosmic thoughts for all of the WSM team.
Denys Lépinardhttp://www.ontostat.com/index.htm
