If you were to encounter an alien species that you couldn’t otherwise communicate with you could at the very least share math among one another to demonstrate that you are advanced civilizations capable of making sense of the world around you. It’s what makes math the universal language. Written and spoken languages may be different as well as customs and cultures but in theory, no matter who you are, or where in the cosmos you reside, the math that underpins the laws of physics would be applicable to everyone, everywhere.
It’s why we hold equations in such high regard and insist of making sure that all theories have empirical data to back them up. Just knowing how something works isn’t enough. You have to be able to prove it. To show your work. E = mc2 and all that.
But there’s one number out there that physicists hold in especially high regard. Even assign a religious reverence to it. At least that is, when they aren’t fearing it. Good, old number 137. The fine structure constant of the Universe. A number so pure that it doesn’t even need units to describe it. A number that oddly enough pops up in multiple places throughout the Universe. Surely, this can’t purely be a coincidence? There’s got to be something to it, right?
As New Scientist puts it:
“The idea that constants of nature – things like the speed of light, strength of forces and the masses of various particles – might not be so constant has an illustrious history. In 1937, physicist Paul Dirac wrote to the journal Nature, questioning astronomer Arthur Eddington’s attempts to calculate the constants from scratch. How could we be sure they haven’t changed over cosmological time?
The fine structure constant, also known as alpha, is a case in point. Alpha lies at the center of a theory Dirac initiated and [Richard] Feynman worked on: quantum electrodynamics, or QED. This is the quantum theory of the electromagnetic force, and describes the interactions between light and matter. Alpha determines their strength. It is itself constructed from the speed of light, the electron’s charge, pi – few physical theories are complete without pi – and a couple of other fundamental constants, carefully arranged so that it is just a pure number, independent of human influence: 0.00729735, just a whisker away from 1/137.
Change this number by a smidgen, and you change the universe. Increase it too much, and protons repel each other so strongly that small atomic nuclei can’t hold together. Go a bit further and nuclear fusion factories within stars grind to a halt and can no longer produce carbon, the element on which life is based. Make alpha much smaller, and molecular bonds fall apart at lower temperatures, altering many processes essential to life.”
In other words our Universe is somehow perfectly fine-tuned to allow for life as we know it and number 137 is the reason why. Coincidence? I think not.
Of course, this information lends itself towards a natural line of questioning. If the Universe is fine-tuned, who fine-tuned it? Or better yet, is it that we live in a Multiverse comprised of an infinite number of possible universes, almost all of which aren’t conducive to life because their numbers are off by a little bit, and we just so happen to live in the one and only Universe that does contain life? Making our reality more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than divine intervention, the result of trial and error on a cosmic scale, akin to monkeys producing a Shakespearean work if given enough random attempts on a typewriter.
Obviously no one knows the answer to those questions yet. In fact, we may never know why things are the way they are. But what we do know is that math in general and number 137 in particular play key roles in our attempts to figure out exactly what’s going on and that there’s got to be something to that.
So much so that if we ever do encounter an alien species we’d likely skip all other forms of math and just share with them the number 137. If they’re aware of the significance of that number then we’d know that we’re both on the same page.
Is number 137 the key to understanding the Universe?
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