“[The fine structure constant] is one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by humans … you might say the “hand of God” wrote that number … .”
— Physicist Richard Feynman
When otherwise hard-headed physicists invoke God or the Devil, you can be fairly sure they’re just doing it for effect, not as a reflection of their godly beliefs. Einstein, a deist, famously said that God didn’t play dice with the universe (preferring causality over the randomness of quantum mechanics); Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman, late director of Fermilab and an atheist, titled his book on the Higgs boson The God Particle (claiming his publisher nixed The Goddamn Particle); Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian pioneer of quantum physics, also a deist, said that his first question to the Devil after he died would be, “What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?”
Good question, since the fine structure constant, aka “α,” or “alpha,” has given rise to a lot of speculation by both scientists and mystics — in one case, in the personage of the same person, as we’ll see. In contrast to other constants of nature, such as the speed of light, the intensity of gravity and the Planck constant (which connects the energy and frequency of a photon), the fine structure constant alpha is dimensionless: It has no units, it’s just a number. Contrast this with the other constants I just mentioned. The speed of light, for instance, is defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. But that depends on knowing what units we’re using. Suppose we wanted to demonstrate to ETs in another solar system that we’re smart enough to have figured out the speed of light. How do we convey that knowledge if they don’t know what meters and seconds are?
The beauty and inherent mystery of alpha is that we can show those ETs that we’ve figured out advanced physics by simply sending them a number (in binary code — we only use the decimal system because we have ten fingers). If they have the technology to receive our message, we can be pretty sure they’ll understand what it means, since they’ll have figured out alpha too. It’s a cool number, about 0.007297…, which is close to the reciprocal of 137, i.e. 1/137.
For a while, physicists, in particular Arthur Eddington, thought alpha was exactly 1/137. Eddington was the Carl Sagan of the 1930s, writing several hugely popular books on science for laypeople. Unlike Sagan, in addition to being a first-rate scientist (he was the first to correctly model how stars shine), Eddington was also a mystic. After figuring out the approximate number of protons in the universe, he claimed that, from that number, alpha could be “obtained by pure deduction,” that is, metaphysically. In 1929, he said that it was exactly 1/137 (switching from his previous derivation of 1/136, earning him the teasing sobriquet “Arthur Adding-one”).
It would be cool if alpha was exactly 1/137, though, because of its Kabbalistic connection. In the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical interpretation of the Bible, a word can be assigned a numerical value, its gematria. And the gematria of the word Kabbalah is (cue spooky music) 137.
Alpha is about as crucial a constant as you can get, connecting several of nature’s most fundamental values (see the illustration). It crops up everywhere, both in particle physics and life itself. Change the value of alpha just a tad, and stars wouldn’t be able to synthesize carbon. No carbon, no life. No life, no us. Whether God, the Devil, some kid playing simulation games or Lady Luck herself gave us alpha, we could do worse than give thanks for Feynman’s “magic number.”
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) pretends he actually understands what he writes about here.
This article appears in The Foilies 2022.
But the speed of light isn’t constant. In fact, the whole construct of its constantinuity is a human endeavor, along with the associated equations. The complicated equation doesn’t put the delicious Triscuit cracker in my stomach. The “speed of light” has changed during my lifetime probably as much as “the age of the universe”. Not because the material universe has changed, but because some hairless ape decided to do something else with the material. An alien might be like “silly humans, light travels at ten trillion miles per nanosecond! Invent a new stopwatch!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pHY_5psG5…
“It is generally assumed that fundamental constants such as c have the same value throughout spacetime, meaning that they do not depend on location and do not vary with time.” I’ve seen no evidence that c isn’t constant.
Good morning!
“I’ve seen no evidence that c isn’t constant.”
You haven’t REEEEAALLLLY looked, have you? Be honest…a few hours on google doesn’t count.
“It is generally assumed…”
“It is dangerous to assume because you might make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. “
“Theory: a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained.”
What will the next stopwatch determine the speed of “light” to be?
OK, the Veritasium guy has weighed in on the speed of light;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27…
Who knew?
Mitch, I knew. Whereas some people look around them and see the hand of gods at play, others see the holy scriptures of their chosen sacred scientists at work. Often, these people mock eachother. Do you and Barry mock people who see the hand of god at work in the world around them? Isn’t it the same world in which you live as well? Is it more that you believe yourselves to be correct, or them to be wrong?
“Light” is as generic a “thing” as there is. Time is an arbitrary abstraction. That’s hardcore physics 101. You really gotta get that through your head. Or not, itmakes no difference to anybody except those unto whom you preach your sermons. Those who give any shits about your sermons, that is.
Start at 2:45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev7e9sfWIJ…
Mitch ignited a veritasium video binge from me. Lots of good stuff. I can’t help but call out statements of fact that aren’t fact. It’s a big science no-no. Of course the host on that channel is just an actor for a scripted sight, but he’s very wrong in this video at 5:02
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lotbZQ55Sg…
That “fact” can be easily demolished. It’s a game of metaphysics to me, to spot the logical goofs in an argument presented as logical conclusions. Like that the “speed of light” is a fundamental constant of the universe.
I’m not sure what sermons you are complaining about. Science is a way of understanding, based on sharable evidence. It doesn’t make claims about what IS, only about what we can all see if we look. If you see something different, all science can do is point out that your evidence is not shared by others. And if it is, poof, it is science.
Here’s a sharable bit of evidence about veritasium. https://www.veritasium.com/about
” It doesn’t make claims about what IS, only about what we can all see if we look.”
Tell that to Barry! I don’t see no E equaling a squared MC anywhere. Do you?
Well, Einstein wrote up his reasons for believing that mass and energy were different aspects of the same thing back in 1905, and you can read what he wrote. You can also read the explanatory works of many people since. It may take a little understanding of math, because math is one of the ways humans have tried to stand on the shoulders of people before them, so that they don’t have to derive everything from scratch. Or you can look at the fact that atomic bombs release great power, and note that the physicists who developed them were relying on a variety of relationships that had been discovered before them, relationships like E=mc^2.
Science is just a monk saying when I plant these seeds, sometimes things that one generation of resulting plants didn’t show turn up again in the next generation, with this reliable ratio. I wonder why that could be? He comes up with a theory, and then, later, people who do x-ray crystallography find a structure that might provide one level of explanation of that. Science sees that relationship; it makes no claims about WHY, just about HOW. Science is brave, in that the monk has to say what he observes, even if the pope tells him he’s not seeing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_m…
Newtonian physics is still taught (I assume) even though it is a summary that is already known to work only at scales we are most familiar with. It does not claim to be an ultimate explanation. Everything is provisional. Some things reliably yield results that can be used to build things like tall buildings and machines that pick up the sound of your voice and generate an audio pattern that carries an answer to questions like “who wrote the bum-bum-bum-Bum symphony.”
Science is not the popularized explanations of things, and it’s not big expensive equipment. You may find big expensive equipment put to use for the same reason that if you’re going over a crime scene that others have carefully inspected, you might want to bring a magnifying glass. I think if you read the memoirs of great scientists, you’ll find that they are quite humble in the face of all the things that are not explained by science.
I truly wish that humility were shared by those who dismiss science because, they insist, they know all about why things are the way they are, and it’s because of the one particular god that their parents told them about. The lack of humility is evident in the way they dismiss the god the people across the street were taught about by their parents.
The universe is still a mystery to us all. Some consider it a playground for discovery.
To be fair, I’m not complaining, I’m being snarky.
C as a constant speed of “light” is OBVIOUSLY a subjective interpretation. Einstein himself said so. He made it very clear. C was and is an established value that works for established goals. Several reasons are presented in the video Mitch linked to demonstrate how that “fundamental right” can be wrong.
The value of C has changed during my lifetime, and more often for people older than me.
C was established basically to play satellite pinball. Long distance communication with the most modern technologies. Those technologies will change, as will the value of C.
Imagine an equation to explain the fundamentals of surfing. S = surfer W = wave. No two waves or surfers are alike. What’s the intention of the equation? To what decimal point do we need to be “accurate”?
Respect should be given, IMO, to the bigger picture. Else you might find yourself mocking people who “believe in God”, while preaching about the fundamentals of “light”.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-teachers…
People can and will believe what they want.
If they try to impose their beliefs on me or, worse, tell me that I cannot be a full participant in our society because someone wrote down, several millennia ago, that their god says so, I will probably mock them, unless they offer me shareable evidence that their particular god exists, is the real one, and, astonishingly, cares what I do with my sexual organ.
“If they try to impose their beliefs on me or, worse, tell me that I cannot be a full participant in our society because…”
Who are “they”? The same people who tell you what pharmaceutical chemicals you have to put into your body, whether you need them or not, to be a full participant in society? The same people who use ‘science’ to pollute the air you breath and water you drink?
You pick and choose as much as the people you mock. So…full circle…
The speed of light is not constant. To insist it is, is to ignore the reason somebody said it was in the first place.
Nobody uses “science” to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink. We have an economy that uses relationships that science has discovered.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, about science suggests or instructs that every time a new source of power is discovered it must be put to use to dominate people. People destroying things in order to dominate people dates back well before the invention of modern science.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, about science suggests or instructs that people pollute the air and water. Perhaps science can be blamed for enabling population growth to the point that such pollution becomes problematic.
Science is a way of finding out what’s connected, materially, to what. And, because it works, it increases human beings’ ability to act as agents in the world. Whether the result looks more like heaven or hell is not due to science but to people.
And, takedrugsyou dontneed, “they” are the radical right preachers and Islamist mullahs who want to impose the beliefs of previous times on people today, because “they” claim to know what the invisible creator and ruler of the universe wants us to do, in ways they further claim the rest of us do not. Them and their followers, the sorts of people who would prevent all people from using contraception and will use the state’s weaponry to enforce their will on women who would like to terminate their pregnancies.
That’s who “they” are. And “they” are a great danger to humanity, in ways that seeking knowledge is not.
“I’ve seen no evidence that c isn’t constant.”
Barry hasn’t really looked, has he Mitch? Or do you think he’s got blinders on, and doesn’t want to acknowledge his lack of knowledge?
I think Barry has popular columns to write. Perhaps he lacks the time or inclination to discuss this with you. For that, you’d have to ask him. As for me, I just responded because I don’t think my defense of the scientific approach represents preaching, so I was startled when you suggested I was presenting “sermons.”
Well, I’m asking you what you think of his assertion. It’s the topic of this week’s popular column. Says right here in Barry’s bio by the article that he was a science teacher, so I’m pretty sure he can muster a thought beyond what he’s written.
It’s bunk. And it’s not like either of you would say, or have said, otherwise regarding anything either of you know to be bunk, either. “Time” and “light” are parametrically subjective, depending entirely on the intentions of establishing a definition for either.
I do not believe it is bunk, I believe it is abbreviation. I have never measured the speed of light, and the Veritasium video was great in the way it pointed out that measurements of c always make the assumption that light/energy/information travels in all directions at the same speed and in the same way.
I’m sure Barry knows, and could have pointed out, the ways in which the value of c has been experimentally determined. And I’m sure Barry knows that, based on logic, the sun might not rise tomorrow. But it’s hard to dot those i’s and cross those t’s when you’re writing a sub-1000 word column on a completely different topic.
There is a certain sort of generic spirituality — I am not pinning it on you — that says that because we cannot know both the momentum and position of anything beyond a certain limit, we can’t know much of anything, and so assertions unsupported by any evidence are as good as what science says. I don’t believe that. I just recognize that there could well be lots of stuff not captured, and perhaps not capturable, by shared observations. But that doesn’t make someone right or clever when they say “it’s god’s will” and think they’ve provided an explanation of anything.
I went back and re-read the column. Barry says we have measured the speed of light at 300,000,000 meters per second.
Do we know what time is? I sure don’t.
But I do know that what I use to decide when to get someplace is a watch, that the watch makes measurements that are useful to me, and I expect that if I tried to use it to measure how much of whatever time is has seemed to “elapse” between the time I send a light beam off to a mirror 150,000,000 meters away and the time I see a reflection will be one of those units we call seconds.
Does time exist? I don’t know. I only know what is available to my senses, and my senses tell me things change, and I can only observe that change if I say things like “then it was 1 and now it is 2.” I don’t know what “then” means and I don’t know what “now” means, but even not knowing their meanings, I manage to catch the train, usually, and I rely on the watch for that.
I measure the speed of light as instantaneous. I can’t even click the stopwatch fast enough between the moment I turn on the flashlight and the moment I see a circle of light on the wall in front of me.
What’s interesting about “the speed of light” is that, as you’ve pointed out with the video, the authors of its “value” explicitly say that the entire concept…literally…is based on countless presumptions that can be contradicted in countless ways.
Very few people can keep that in mind when talking about it.
For what it’s worth, I don’t accept that. To the extent that we rely on our senses as supplemented by technology, absolutely everything we say and do could, in theory, be completely different than we imagine it to be. That goes back to Plato’s cave or before. That does not mean we cannot accurately report what our senses are telling us, and it does not mean that two or more people cannot compare what their senses tell them. What they can discover is what I’m calling “shareable evidence.” Among such things is good evidence for the speed (ok, the average speed) at which light travels.
I’d be disappointed if any scientist you could speak with insisted that the “shareable evidence” excludes the possibility that there are things we simply cannot know. Those I’ve known were mostly very humble. Ask a physicist who believes in the big bang what happened before it. Ask a mathematician what the value of 1 over 0 is. Ask a biologist how neural events give rise to the sensation of sadness or joy — not the connection to other events which also caused sadness or joy, but the actual “qualia” that we describe to one another. I doubt you’ll find anyone asserting knowledge of any such thing, but I suppose I could be wrong.
Incidentally, as I’m fairly certain you already know, anyone familiar with our current understanding of physics, biology, and chemistry, at the high school level, would explain that you’re not going to have success at measuring the speed with which an electromagnetic wave appears to travel by using your unaided senses, because your senses are resting on a layer of cascading chemistry that is mind-bogglingly slower than the electromagnetic wave.
Among other things, that’s why we see the illusion of motion when presented with TV or movie frames, one after the other. So you’d need to have some technology to support your ability to send things a long way, or to measure “time” more quickly than our senses are able. So I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by pointing out that you can’t measure the speed of light with a stopwatch. This is still way too slow, but it shows what you can discover by supporting your raw senses with technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIUZ-qKWnX…
“fundamental constants such as c have the same value throughout spacetime, meaning that they do not depend on location and do not vary with time”
That’s only and entirely in context of the equations and their intentions themselves.
“It is neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation I can make of my own free will”
…that’s the truth of the matter, straight from the foremost author of the holy equations.
“It would be cool if alpha was exactly 1/137”
POOF! Alpha is now 1/137. All you have to do is adjust every other value you wish to calculate to accommodate it. It really is that easy, and it really is that arbitrary void context.
“Science is not the popularized explanations of things,”
True, but that’s not the point I’m making. Most people just regurgitate “fundamental constants such as c have the same value throughout spacetime, meaning that they do not depend on location and do not vary with time”.
2X + 2Y = Z
Z = 4
It’d be cool if Z = 5
POOF! Z = 5
2.5X + 2.5Y = Z
…you get the jist (hopefully?)
Hi. Since 1916 the Sommerfeld FSC – discovered within QED – is a theoretical unsolved problem there and since then. Why? because the answer is not hidden within the Standard Theory where this problem appeared. It is hidden within General Relativity when Thermodynamic Principles are applied. (see research square: “The fine structure constant derived from General Relativity combined with Thermodynamics.” The last word has the experiment.