Fine-structure-constant Quote by Werner Heisenberg

“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…” quote by Werner Heisenberg — Download Open image

““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.””

Werner Heisenberg

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“Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.”

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“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part…

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The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.

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Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.

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It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that…

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If we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?

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The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably…

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“what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’.77”

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A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

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It was about three o'clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me ...…

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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

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More Fine-structure-constant quotes

“The strength of the familiar electromagnetic force between two electrons, for example, is expressed in physics in terms of a constant known as the fine structure constant. The value of this constant, almost exactly 1/137, has puzzled many generations of physicists. A joke made about the famous English physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984), one of the founders of quantum mechanics, says…

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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…

Alison Charlotte Primrose

“If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the…

John D. Barrow

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“Through Jung [Pauli] became very interested in various kinds of mysticism, including Jewish mysticism. This led Pauli to develop a friendship with Gershom Scholem, the world's greatest authority in that field and in the Cabala, … On one occasion Scholem asked me to tell him about unsolved problems in modern physics. … When I mentioned this number --137-- to Scholem,…

Victor Frederick Weisskopf

“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 =…

William Eisen

“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…

Howard Georgi & S. L. Glashow

“All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature…

Arnold Sommerfeld

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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…

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“Number ... should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature…

Marie-Louise von Franz

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“Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam too freely from their nuclei nor cling too closely. This just-right balance has led many scientists to conclude that the universe couldn’t have hit upon…

Sam Kean

“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…

Gerald Holton

“For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, … For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now.”

Charles P. Enz

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Fine-structure-constant Quote by Werner Heisenberg

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