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Quotes about the Fine Structure Constant - The FAILURE OF QUANTUM THEORY

 

“There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number about 137.03597. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago,. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!”  Richard P. Feynman

 

“If alpha [the FSC] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.”  Max Born

 

“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the FSC. The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.”  Leon M. Lederman

 

“The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.” “When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the FSC?” Wolfgang Pauli 1934

 

“There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'FSC' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions, ....”  Roger Penrose

 

“Let us begin with the FSC. The FSC is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action. ... We obtain action when we multiply energy by time. ... We are challenged to find a unified theory of electric particles and radiation in which the electrostatic type of action and the quantum type of action are traced to their source.” Arthur Eddington

 

“There was a time when people thought the value of the FSC was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter, but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the FSC as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on, and it's not really that fundamental.”  Steven Weinberg

 

“Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?” John Archibald Wheeler

 

“[The FSC] defines how atomic nuclei bind together. Its value controls the power from the Sun and how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table.” Martin J. Rees

 

“The FSC is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).”  David J. Griffiths

 

“The FSC derives its name from Sommerfeld's work to explain the fine details of the hydrogen spectrum. Sommerfeld expressed the energy states of the hydrogen atom in terms of the constant [alpha], it came to be called the fine-structure constant.” John S. Rigden

 

“The significance of [the FSC] goes far beyond atomic physics, however. It is the smallness of 1/137 compared to unity that enables us to treat the coupling between the electromagnetic field and a charged particle such as an electron as a small perturbation, a fact of great computational importance. Paul C.W. Davies

 

“If the deep logic of what determines the value of the FSC also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would be stymied. Fortunately, we do not need to know everything before we can know something.” John D. Barrow