Why 137?

The Story Goes Thus:

I had lot of coffee too late into the night. I was laying in bed, my mind racing like a chipmunk on crack (which moves very fast, but doesn’t actually get anywhere very fast because it is so small). So, I started counting to myself to try to calm myself down. This is not my only method mind you, but it was the first thing that came to mind. So I was counting, “one, two, three,” so on. I got to 140 and then stopped. I thought back to the number 137. That is a very attractive number I thought to myself.

It is balanced, 3 letters, and has a nice balance of curves and sharp edges. The one is mostly straight and very linear. The three is all curves, a sensuous flow from top to bottom. The seven has a slight bend on the straight part (on some fonts). So, I decided to look up this number the next day.

Sure enough, there is quite an interesting little thing having to do with this number. My search brought me to an article at www.137.com itself. His HTML skills need some updating and I really want his domain name (this is the reason I have www.onethirtyseven.com and www.1-3-7.com but not www.137.com), but he does have some information on this topic.

Basically, 137 is the fine structure constant, or the probability than an electron will absorb or emit a photon (a very basic building block in our reality). It is written as the Greek letter alpha (of which I don’t know the HTML entity, anybody want to help me out if there is one?). The formula to define alpha is the charge of an electron squared divided by the speed of light times Planck’s constant. The end result (alpha) is a pure dimensionless number. You can read more at the above article.

A much better article (and website) devoted to this subject is located at www.fine-structure-constant.org. It illustrates in a bit more detail the search by Richard Feynman for proper calculation of this number.

So, now you know the rest of the story, and I hope you liked it!