137 (revisted)
Drive east on Pine Street, away from Wilson Hall, and you come to several other important facilities, including the collider detector facility (CDF), designed to make most of our discoveries about matter,and the newly constructed Richard P. Feynman Computer Center,
named after the great Cal Tech theorist who died just a few years ago. Keep driving and eventually you come to Eola Road. Take a right and drive straight for a mile or so, and you'll see a 150-year old farmhouse on the left. That's where I lived as director: 137 Eola Road. That's not an official address. It's just the number I chose to put on
the house.
It was Richard Feyman, in fact, who suggested that all physicists put a sign up in their offices or homes to remind them of how much we don't know. The sign would say simply this: 137. One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. This number is related to the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon. The fine-structure constant also answers to the name alpha, and it can be arrived at by taking the square of the charge of the electron divided by the speed of light times Planck's constant. What all that verbiage means is that this one number, 137, contains the crux of electromagnetism (the electron), relativity (the velocity of light), and quantum theory (Planck's constant). It would be less unsettling if the relationship between all these important concepts turned out to be one or three or maybe a multiple of pi. But 137?
The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second. Abraham Lincoln was 6 feet 6 inches tall. Most numbers come with dimensions. But it turns out that when you combine the quantities that make up alpha, all the units cancel! One hundred thirty-seven comes by itself; it shows up naked all over place. This means that scientists on Mars, or on the fourteenth planet of the star Sirius, using whatever god-awful units they have for charge, speed, and their version of Planck's constant, will also get 137. It is a pure number.
Physicists have agonized over 137 for the past fifty years. Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained. I tell my undergraduate students that if they are ever in trouble in a major city anywhere in the world they should write "137" on a sign and hold it up at a busy street corner. Eventually a physicist will see that they're distressed and come to their assistance. (No one to my knowledge has ever tried this, but it should work.)
One of the wonderful (but unverified) stories in physics emphasizes the importance of 137 as well as illustrating the arrogance of theorists. According to this tale, a notable Austrian mathematical physicist of Swiss persuasion, Wolfgang Pauli, went to heaven, we are assured, and, because of his eminence in physics, was given an audience with God.
"Pauli, you're allowed one question. What do you want to know?"
Pauli immediately asked one question that he had labored in vain to answer for the last decade of his life. "Why is alpha equal to one over one hundred thirty-seven?"
God smiled, picked up the chalk, and began writing equations on the blackboard. After a few minutes, She turned to Pauli, who waved his hand. "Das ist falsch!" [That's baloney!]
There's a true story also --- a verifiable story--- that takes place here on earth. Pauli was in fact obsessed with 137, and spent countless hours pondering its significance. The number plagued him to the very end. When Pauli's assistant visited the theorist in the hospital room in which he was placed prior to his fatal operation, Pauli instructed the assistant to note the number on the door as he left. The room number was 137.
That's where I lived: 137 Eola Road.
~ Leon Lederman (Noble Prize for physics 1988 and (now former) director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia,IL)
---from his book - The God Particle - great read...has one on one interview with Democritus, many history and physic lessons, the Dancing Moo-Shu masters,
poetry and God (she smiles) |
