SCIENCE

Why the number “1/137” appears everywhere in nature | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Dec, 2024

VermontDigitalNews.com 3 days ago

1 1 minute read

Each s orbital (red), each of the p orbitals (yellow), the d orbitals (blue) and the f orbitals (green) can contain only two electrons apiece: one spin up and one spin down in each one. The effects of spin, of moving close to the speed of light, and of the inherently fluctuating nature of the quantum fields that permeate the Universe are all responsible for the fine structure that matter exhibits. (Credit: LibreTexts Library/UC Davis)

One of the fundamental constants of nature, the fine-structure constant, determines so much about our Universe. Here’s why it matters.

There’s an enormous existential question that we’ve wondered about ever since we first realized that the Universe does, in fact, obey physical laws at all: why is our Universe the precise way it is, rather than any other way we could’ve imagined? There are only three things that make it so:

the laws of nature themselves,
the fundamental constants governing reality,
and the initial conditions that our Universe was born with.

If our Universe had different laws of nature, then all bets would be off; the cosmos would have been vastly different in almost any way you can fathom. Protons might decay, fundamental quantities like particle masses might not be constant, and the strengths of any fundamental forces might joltingly change at any moment.

If only the initial conditions of our Universe were different, the way the cosmic story unfolded would be the same in terms of broad strokes, but the details would differ between that hypothetical Universe and our own. But for the fundamental constants, some changes would be…

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