Fine-structure-constant Quote by Leon M. Lederman

“In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure…

— Leon O Chua

“Even a good, inveterate atheist like physicist Richard Feynman once said of the fine structure constant, “All good theoretical physicists put this number up…

— Sam Kean

“Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why…

— John Archibald Wheeler

“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…

— K. V. Laurikainen

“The strength of the electromagnetic interaction, for example, is fixed by a number called the “fine-structure constant,” a famous quantity in physics that is…

— Sean Carroll

“The strength of the familiar electromagnetic force between two electrons, for example, is expressed in physics in terms of a constant known as the…

— Mario Livio

“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…

— Carl Johan Calleman

“The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics.”

— Wolfgang Pauli

“Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by…

— Steven Weinberg

If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness],…

— Max Born

“God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And…

— Paul Davies

“For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the…

— Charles P. Enz