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Fine Structure Constant Quotes

Browse 75 quotes about Fine Structure Constant.

Fine Structure Constant Quotes

“While twentieth-century physicists were not able to identify any convincing mathematical constants underlying the fine structure, partly because such thinking has normally not been encouraged, a revolutionary suggestion was recently made by the Czech physicist Raji Heyrovska, who deduced that the fine structure constant, ...really is defined by the [golden] ratio ....”

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Book:The Purposeful Universe: How Quantum Theory and Mayan Cosmology Explain the Origin and Evolution of Life
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“Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.”

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Book:The first three minutes: a modern view of the origin of the universe
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“You too can make the golden cut, relating the two poles of your being in perfect golden proportion, thus enabling the lower to resonate in tune with the higher, and the inner with the outer. In doing so, you will bring yourself to a point of total integration of all the separate parts of your being, and at the same time, you will bring yourself into resonance with the entire universe.... Nonetheless the universe is divided on exactly these principles as proven by literally thousands of points of circumstantial evidence, including the size, orbital distances, orbital frequencies and other characteristics of planets in our solar system, many characteristics of the sub-atomic dimension such as the fine structure constant, the forms of many plants and the golden mean proportions of the human body, to mention just a few well known examples. However the circumstantial evidence is not that on which we rely, for we have the proof in front of us in the pure mathematical principles of the golden mean.”

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Book:The Lamb Slain With A Golden Cut: Spiritual Enlightenment and the Golden Mean Revelation
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“Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works.”

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Book:The Quotable Feynman
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“Numbers, furthermore as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious, possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind. It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential.”

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Book:Number and Time: Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics
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“One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...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.”

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Book:The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?
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“Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind. Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ... To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples.”

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Author:Jonathan Black, Mark Booth
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“God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).”

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Author:Paul Davies
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“Now let us analyze the other two occupants of the inner Sanctuary or Oracle. They are the two cherubim who guard the Ark ... [and] "The Molten Sea" ...There are also two other elements of the Temple of which they are the image, and these other two units are the Great Pyramid and the Inner Court (The Molten Sea = 137 = MG = Two Cherubim = Great Pyramid = Inner Court. All four of these elements are reflections of each other, and they constitute the real key to understanding the mystery of the Temple of Solomon. ..."The Ark of the Covenant of the Lord" [is] a mirror image of "The Great Pyramid of the Emperor" ....”

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Book:The English Cabalah, Vol. 1: The Mysteries of Pi
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“A good example of the archetypal ideas which the archetypes produce are natural numbers or integers. With the aid of the integers the shaping and ordering of our experiences becomes exact. Another example is mathematical group theory. ...important applications of group theory are symmetries which can be found in most different connections both in nature and among the 'artifacts' produced by human beings. Group theory also has important applications in mathematics and mathematical physics. For example, the theory of elementary particles and their interactions can in essential respects be reduced to abstract symmetries. [The Message of the Atoms: Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the Unspeakable]”

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Author:K. V. Laurikainen
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“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.”

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Book:Physics, the Human Adventure: From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond
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“The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck. He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately ....”

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Book:The Scientific Imagination: With a New Introduction
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“One of the most curious of these stories about Pauli concerns the number 137. One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern physics is the value of the fine structure constant, for while the other fundamental constants of nature are all immensely small or enormously large, this fine structure constant 1/137 turns out to be a human-sized number. This number 137 and its place in the scale of the universe particularly puzzled Pauli and continues to challenge physicists today. I was a mystery that Pauli was to take to his death, for on being admitted into the hospital, the physicist was told that he was being put into room 137. According to one version of this story on learning of his room number, Pauli said, "I will never get out of here." The physicist died shortly after.”

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Book:Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind
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“We present a series of hypotheses and speculations, leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world — that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.”

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Author:Howard Georgi & S. L. Glashow
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“True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.”

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Book:The Charm of Physics: Collected Essays of Sheldon Glashow
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“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.”

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Book:Shelter Island II: Proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics
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“In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.”

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Book:Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights into the Existence and Operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio
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“Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.”

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Book:QED and the Men Who Made It
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“It is shown that the golden ratio plays a prominent role in the dimensions of all objects which exhibit five-fold symmetry. It is also showed that among the irrational numbers, the golden ratio is the most irrational and, as a result, has unique applications in number theory, search algorithms, the minimization of functions, network theory, the atomic structure of certain materials and the growth of biological organisms.”

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Book:GOLDEN RATIO AND FIBONACCI NUMBERS, THE
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“The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant. ... An expanded form of the constant leads to equations that define the transformation of electromagnetic energy into electron mass/energy, ...”

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Book:The Enigmatic Electron: A Doorway to Particle Masses
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“The prime number 137 had continuously occupied Pauli's mind. It is an approximate value for a constant appearing in the fine structure theory of atomic spectra which in its theoretical expression ties together electromagnetism, relativity and quantum theory. Pauli saw the fine structure theory of spectra as a key in understanding the deepest contemporary problems of theoretical physics. For that reason the number 137 possessed a mysterious attraction for him.”

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Book:Beyond the Atom: The Philosophical Thought of Wolfgang Pauli
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“In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.”

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Book:No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli
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“If QED [quantum electrodynamics] is merely a phenomenology, how can one account for its remarkable quantitative success? The answer is intimately related to one of its most characteristic features, renormalizability. Because of this, short distance, high energy effects in QED can be absorbed into a finite number of measurable masses and charges. For the first time in the history of physics, there exists a theory which has no obvious intrinsic limitation and enables us in principle to calculate physical phenomena to any accuracy we need in terms of a few measurable parameters such as the elementary electric charge e [fine structure constant] and the electron mass m. Thus the detailed high energy structure of the ultimate theory is irrelevant to the analysis of low energy phenomena except insofar as it determines these parameters. [Quantum Electrodynamics]”

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Author:Toichiro Kinoshita
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“In the early days of atomic physics [before quantum field theory revealed the true meaning of the fine structure constant to be the strength of the coupling between the electron and photon], it was thought to have a value so close to being precisely 1/137 that numerologists started to establish cultish associations with the number 137.”

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Book:Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics
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“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.”

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Book:Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
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“Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this success of Sommerfeld's fine-structure formula "served also as an indirect confirmation of Einstein's relativistic formula for the velocity dependence of inertia mass.”

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Book:Making 20th Century Science: How Theories Became Knowledge
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“We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a string. Such strings can be of any size, but under ordinary circumstances they are quite tiny, ... a value determined by comparing the predictions of the theory for Newton's constant and the fine structure constant to experimental values.”

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Author:Edward Witten
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“As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination, I am certain that there is an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist 'from behind' (namely, through investigating the archetypes) into the world of physics. As an example of background physics, I shall discuss a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams - namely, fine structure, in particular doublet structure of spectral lines and the separation of a chemical element into two isotopes.”

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Book:Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-58
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“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!”

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Book:A Passion for Mathematics: Numbers, Puzzles, Madness, Religion, and the Quest for Reality
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“QED [quantum electrodynamics] reduces ... "all of chemistry and most of physics," to one basic interaction, the fundamental coupling of a photon to electric charge. The strength of this coupling remains, however, as a pure number, the so-called fine-structure constant, which is a parameter of QED that QED itself is powerless to predict.”

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Book:Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics
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“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.”

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Book:Physics and philosophy: the revolution in modern science
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“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'.”

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Book:Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits
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“The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller’s (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli’s mutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher’s stone of the mathematical universe. This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung’s collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy]”

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Author:Todd Hayen
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“The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. 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.”

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Book:Writings on Physics and Philosophy
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“Sommerfeld's fine-structure theory was generally considered to be excellently and unambiguously confirmed by experiment. Because the theory rested on the foundation provided by Bohr, the experiments were also taken as strong support for his theory of atomic structure.”

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Book:Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom: The Bohr Model of Atomic Structure 1913-1925
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“Following the path of earlier unificationists, one of Eddington's aims was to reduce the contingencies in the description of nature, for example, by explaining the fundamental constants of physics rather than accepting them as merely experimental data. One of these constants was the fine-structure constant ..., which entered prominently in Dirac's theory and was known to be about 1/137.”

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Book:Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
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“I introduce the subject of fine structure with a mini-calendar of events. ... Winter 1914-15. Sommerfeld computes relativistic orbits for hydrogen-like atoms. Pashcen, aware of these studies, carefully investigates fine structures, .... January 6, 1916. Sommerfeld announces his fine structure formula, citing results to be published by Paschen in support of his answer. February 1916. Einstein to Sommerfeld: "A revelation!" March 1916. Bohr to Sommerfeld: "I do not believe ever to have read anything with more joy than your beautiful work." September 1916. Paschen publishes his work, acknowledging Sommerfeld's "indefatigable efforts.”

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Book:Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World
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