AaS! 170: What’s So Fine About the Fine Structure Constant?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
What is the fine structure constant? Where does it come from? Why is it so important? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
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Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Have you ever heard of numerology? |
| 0:11.0 | It's the study of numbers, or rather, important numbers, or rather, numbers that appear to be important and seem to be connected to other things that also happen to be |
| 0:23.6 | important. |
| 0:25.0 | Like deciding that there is some important lesson to be learned from the digits in your birthday |
| 0:30.4 | or the number of steps you took today or the license plate of the car that backed into you. |
| 0:36.7 | Or all of the above, the license plate was 605-723, and you're 60 years old. |
| 0:44.1 | You were born on the 23rd, and you had 57 miles left before you ran out of gas. |
| 0:49.2 | This is important. |
| 0:50.2 | This is a connection. |
| 0:51.7 | I mean, naturally, this all gets a little bit silly pretty quickly because |
| 0:56.7 | we are surrounded by numbers everywhere and we are surrounded by connections everywhere. Some of |
| 1:05.6 | those connections are meaningful and some of those connections are just coincidence. |
| 1:12.3 | So you can turn anything into a number. |
| 1:15.4 | I can look at the title of a book and I can assign a number to each letter and then add them |
| 1:21.3 | up or maybe multiply them together or is it divide the first half by the second. |
| 1:26.0 | Anyway, it doesn't matter. |
| 1:31.2 | Or I can count the number of steps I take. |
| 1:40.0 | The amount of water droplets I use in a shower. The amount of how many slices of cheese I had with my breakfast. That's right, my breakfast. Don't judge me. We're surrounded by numbers, and we're |
| 1:46.0 | surrounded by potential ways to connect those numbers. And so numerology is an attempt, not a very |
| 1:53.8 | rigorous attempt, to try to find meaningful connections and interactions between all those |
| 1:59.8 | numbers, to try to explain the existence |
| 2:02.4 | of the numbers that we find in our lives and try to use those numbers to explain other important |
... |
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