Recently I came in possession of Arthur I Miller's Deciphering the Cosmic Number, the Strange Friendship of Wofgang Pauli and Carl Jung. The book is in itself enthralling reading but I knew very little about this so-called, "cosmic number".
I discovered it was the mysterious number 137 that obsessed Pauli and Quantum Physicists ever since Sommerfield came upon it in 1916. It is called the "Fine-Structure Constant". Not knowing much about it and how it is derived (it seems not many, if anyone, knows either) I turned to the Wikipedia article where I was sure to find the answer. I was none the wiser but the entry had this wonderful quote from Richard Feynman. He referred to the fine-structure constant in these terms:
“There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi 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!" (Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129)What caught my eye was where Feynman says, "You might say the 'hand of God' wrote that number, and 'we don't know how He pushed his pencil.'" What a tremendous figure of speech!
Perhaps we do know how God “pushed his pencil.” If Yahweh wrote in Hebrew, as we are told by those who claim to be in the know, he did, then probably we need to read his works the way one reads Hebrew....backwards! And from bottom to top! Which, according to Prof. Higgins "is absolutely frightening." (My Fair Lady, Act I, Scene I)
Whatever our speculations, I am reminded of words attributed to Galileo:
"Philosophy is written in the grand book of the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood until one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one wanders about in a dark labyrinth."Oh, just by the way, Arthur Miller tells us in the prologue to his book (p.xvii) that the sum of the Hebrew letters of the word "Kabbalah" equals 137. Now how is that for a scary, frightening synchronicity!
Picture credit and another fine article: "The fine-structure constant and the nature of the universe, Ye cannae change the laws of physics. Or can you?", The Economist, August 31st, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/16930866
©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za
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