Why Is 1/137 One of the Greatest Unsolved Problems In Physics?

Its 0.007299, not that hard to solve bros.

i can attest: it's amazing how i always understand almost exactly 1/137th of every PBS spacetime video i watch

Wolfgang Pauli had always been mystified by fine structure constant. He died in hospital in room number 137.

"To build a universe it may be that only one number needs to be decided. And from it all other constants of nature follow." That sounds a lot like the seed value for a procedurally generated world (like mincraft)... But I also like the idea that it could be related to some higher level geometries that we don't yet understand (like PI is to circles).

Some alien civilization wanted to make a fully simulated space game. One programmer set a constant as 1/137 during development, then left the dev team. After a while some other programmer went over the code and couldn't figure out what the constant was for. He commented the code saying "I don't know what it does or why it has that value. When deleted the whole universe breaks down so don't touch it."

Little known fact: our universe was a typo, the 4D experimentalists had originally meant to type "1337" for the seed phrase

The most interesting thing about physics is that when we start to tug on the strings of one thing we find out it's tangled with the strings of the entire universe. In Marcus Aurelius words: “And in the case of superior things like stars, we discover a kind of unity in separation. The higher we rise on the scale of being, the easier it is to discern a connection even among things separated by vast distances.” Dude lived thousands of years ago and he was already unto something

I loved the way you all wrapped this video up. Gave me goosebumps thinking that the universe could be built off of one constant variable. Something extremely complex came from something so simple.

Outstanding and stimulating video! When I studied physics at UC Berkeley, my quantum mechanics classes were Physics 137A and 137B, not a coincidence

Pauli died in 1958 in Zürich in hospital room No. 137. He was crazy about this room number and saw it as a bad sign!

This number is also the ratio between electronic force and strong force so it could be related to this

A thought moment: It's fascinating that the rough age of the universe has been believed to be around 13.7 billion years.

wow the conundrum really is like discovering pi but not being able to visualise a circle

I stopped understanding anything really 40 episodes ago or so. But I am addicted to this channel <3

It’s wonderful to have a proportional representation of the proton being projected as an electron after a proton is discovered and weighted in terms of h bar in a field between two h bars. A discovery indeed! To get to h bar.. Thank you Mat.

Let me add something unexplored. The number 137 appears as the hypotenuse in a Pythagorean Triple with the proportions 88:105:137. The sum of these three numbers is 330. Divide 330 by 105 and the quotient is 22/7, the famous fraction used to represent pi. All this leads to marvellous things.

Man I understood 1/137th of it all, but still nice to learn something new that is truly fascinating.

Astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was fascinated by pure numbers. He promoted the "Eddington number, " which he calculated to be 10E80 protons in the universe (current estimate). He used that number and a complicated formula to derive the fine structure constant which had been measured to be 1/136 (at the time). Later, when alpha was measured more accurately and determined to be 1/137, Eddington revised his formula so that it now equaled 1/137. He was then known as "Arthur Adding-one." On the other hand, he's also the guy who put Einstein on the map.

Thank you Matt and Space Time. You put on an amazing presentation every single time.

I am amazed! If I was younger, I would choose a physics study in quantummechanica! But these kind of videos keep me up to date!