Saturday, December 5, 2020

The fine structure is the noise induced by looking

As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it’s measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure number that shapes the universe to an astonishing degree — “a magic number that comes to us with no understanding,” as Richard Feynman described it. Paul Dirac considered the origin of the number “the most fundamental unsolved problem of physics.”

Quanta

The observation loss when forcing observations to fit the 3D world of our instruments. The noise of just inserting the instrument before we even perturbed the system.

No comments: