3 Truth and Beauty
57
accuracy (up to about 1 part in a billion) is expressed as a reciprocal, i.e.
1/ α = 137.035999037(91).
The Fine Structure Constant remains one of the great enigmas of modern
physics. Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, stated that all theoretical physicists should go to sleep at night with its value pasted on the wall above their
bed to remind them of its unexplained nature. He had this to say about the
issue:
“Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from:
is it related to π 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!” [12].
The very name of these quantities, i.e. constants, reflects the implicit belief
that their values do not change throughout the past and future, or over the
length and breadth, of the Universe. Likewise, the laws of physics are also
believed to be immutable. The laws of Conservation of Momentum and
Energy are found to be valid from sub-atomic to cosmological scales. This
immutability of physical laws and constants is a credo for which Occam’s
Razor provides some sort of justification, i.e. that unchanging laws and
constants provide a simpler scenario.
From time to time, prominent physicists, such as Sir Arthur Eddington
and Paul Dirac, father of Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, whom we shall
meet in Chap. 9, have floated the idea that some of the fundamental constants
may change their values over time. The latter proposed that the value of the
Gravitational Constant G decreases by 5 parts in 10 11 per year as the Universe
expands, a rate of change far too small to be detected by current terrestrial
experiments. Philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead wrote
that the laws of physics themselves must change [13]:
“Since the laws of nature depend on the individual characters of the things constituting nature, as the things change, then consequently the laws will change. Thus
the modern evolutionary view of the physical Universe should conceive of the laws
of nature as evolving concurrently with the things constituting the environment.
Thus the conception of the Universe as evolving subject to fixed eternal laws should
be abandoned.”
57
accuracy (up to about 1 part in a billion) is expressed as a reciprocal, i.e.
1/ α = 137.035999037(91).
The Fine Structure Constant remains one of the great enigmas of modern
physics. Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, stated that all theoretical physicists should go to sleep at night with its value pasted on the wall above their
bed to remind them of its unexplained nature. He had this to say about the
issue:
“Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from:
is it related to π 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!” [12].
The very name of these quantities, i.e. constants, reflects the implicit belief
that their values do not change throughout the past and future, or over the
length and breadth, of the Universe. Likewise, the laws of physics are also
believed to be immutable. The laws of Conservation of Momentum and
Energy are found to be valid from sub-atomic to cosmological scales. This
immutability of physical laws and constants is a credo for which Occam’s
Razor provides some sort of justification, i.e. that unchanging laws and
constants provide a simpler scenario.
From time to time, prominent physicists, such as Sir Arthur Eddington
and Paul Dirac, father of Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, whom we shall
meet in Chap. 9, have floated the idea that some of the fundamental constants
may change their values over time. The latter proposed that the value of the
Gravitational Constant G decreases by 5 parts in 10 11 per year as the Universe
expands, a rate of change far too small to be detected by current terrestrial
experiments. Philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead wrote
that the laws of physics themselves must change [13]:
“Since the laws of nature depend on the individual characters of the things constituting nature, as the things change, then consequently the laws will change. Thus
the modern evolutionary view of the physical Universe should conceive of the laws
of nature as evolving concurrently with the things constituting the environment.
Thus the conception of the Universe as evolving subject to fixed eternal laws should
be abandoned.”