{"quotes":[{"text":"At his 'World of Physics' Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!","author":"Clifford A. Pickover","tags":["fine-structure-constant","mathematics","physics","science"],"id":1900,"author_id":"Clifford+A.+Pickover"},{"text":"But some numbers, called dimensionless numbers, have the same numerical value no matter what units of measurement are chosen. Probably the most famous of these is the 'fine-structure constant,' .... Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature.","author":"John Archibald Wheeler","tags":["fine-structure-constant","history-of-science","physics"],"id":9110,"author_id":"John+Archibald+Wheeler"},{"text":"The strength of the familiar electromagnetic force between two electrons, for example, is expressed in physics in terms of a constant known as the fine structure constant. The value of this constant, almost exactly 1/137, has puzzled many generations of physicists. A joke made about the famous English physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984), one of the founders of quantum mechanics, says that upon arrival to heaven he was allowed to ask God one question. His question was: 'Why 1/137?","author":"Mario Livio","tags":["fine-structure-constant","heaven","history-of-science","physics","quantum-mechanics"],"id":38947,"author_id":"Mario+Livio"},{"text":"The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant, a ~ 1/137, as manifested in the factor-of-137 spacings between the classical electron radius, electron Compton radius, and Bohr orbit radius. ... An a-quantized mass-generation grid extends accurately from the electron all the way to the top quark t, and leads to a corresponding a-quantized particle lifetime grid.","author":"Malcolm H. Mac Gregor","tags":["electrons","fine-structure-constant","physics"],"id":47894,"author_id":"Malcolm+H.+Mac+Gregor"},{"text":"Through Jung [Pauli] became very interested in various kinds of mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. This led Pauli to develop a friendship with Gershom Scholem, the world's greatest authority in that field and in the Cabala, .... On one occasion Scholem asked me to tell him about unsolved problems in modern physics. .... When I mentioned this number --137-- to Scholem, .... He told me that in Hebrew .... The number corresponding to the word 'cabala' happens to be 137.","author":"Victor F. Weisskopf","tags":["137","cabala","fine-structure-constant","jung","mysticism","pauli","physics","scholem","science"],"id":59575,"author_id":"Victor+F.+Weisskopf"},{"text":"We can measure the fine structure constant with very great precision, but so far none of our theories has provided an explanation of its measured value. One of the aims of superstring theory is to predict this quantity precisely. Any theory that could do that would be taken very seriously indeed as a potential 'Theory of Everything'.","author":"John D. Barrow","tags":["constants-of-nature","fine-structure-constant","physics","string-theory"],"id":76851,"author_id":"John+D.+Barrow"},{"text":"There is only one universal language, which is the language of numbers and proportions that are so striking and stunningly built into the Great Pyramid and to which our current science has no appropriate response. We can no longer ignore that this ancient civilization was aware of our units used in modern mathematics and physics and were even aware of our metric system. Our metric system originating in the eighteenth century, designed and implemented by a committee of mathematicians and physicists commissioned by the French revolutionary government.","author":"Willem Witteveen","tags":["constants-of-nature","fine-structure-constant","great-pyramid","physics"],"id":81215,"author_id":"Willem+Witteveen"},{"text":"The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century. Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology.","author":"Gerald Holton","tags":["anthropic-principle","constants-of-nature","fine-structure-constant","history-of-science","physics"],"id":83827,"author_id":"Gerald+Holton"},{"text":"To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.","author":"Steven Weinberg","tags":["fine-structure-constant","history-of-science","mathematics","physics","theory-of-everything"],"id":98964,"author_id":"Steven+Weinberg"},{"text":"Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... Leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.","author":"Werner Heisenberg","tags":["fine-structure-constant","physics","quantum-theory","relativity"],"id":99492,"author_id":"Werner+Heisenberg"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":61,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}