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Paul M. Sutteris an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of "Ask a Spaceman" and "Space Radio," and author of "How to Die in Space."

A seemingly harmless, random number with no units or dimensions has cropped up in so many places in physics and seems to control one of the most fundamental interactions in the universe.

Its name is the fine-structure constant, and it's a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137.

If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from.

Watch: The Most Important Number in the Universe

Atoms have a curious property: They can emit or absorb radiation of very specific wavelengths, called spectral lines. Those wavelengths are so specific because of quantum mechanics. An electron orbiting around a nucleus in an atom can't have just any energy; it's restricted to specific energy levels.

When electrons change levels, they can emit or absorb radiation, but that radiation will have exactly the energy difference between those two levels, and nothing else hence the specific wavelengths and the spectral lines.

But in the early 20th century, physicists began to notice that some spectral lines were split, or had a "fine structure" (and now you can see where I'm going with this). Instead of just a single line, there were sometimes two very narrowly separated lines.

The full explanation for the "fine structure" of the spectral line rests in quantum field theory, a marriage of quantum mechanics and special relativity. And one of the first people to take a crack at understanding this was physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. He found that to develop the physics to explain the splitting of spectral lines, he had to introduce a new constant into his equations a fine-structure constant.

Related: 10 mind-boggling things you should know about quantum physics

The introduction of a constant wasn't all that new or exciting at the time. After all, physics equations throughout history have involved random constants that express the strengths of various relationships. Isaac Newton's formula for universal gravitation had a constant, called G, that represents the fundamental strength of the gravitational interaction. The speed of light, c, tells us about the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. The spring constant, k, tells us how stiff a particular spring is. And so on.

But there was something different in Sommerfeld's little constant: It didn't have units. There are no dimensions or unit system that the value of the number depends on. The other constants in physics aren't like this. The actual value of the speed of light, for example, doesn't really matter, because that number depends on other numbers. Your choice of units (meters per second, miles per hour or leagues per fortnight?) and the definitions of those units (exactly how long is a "meter" going to be?) matter; if you change any of those, the value of the constant changes along with it.

But that's not true for the fine-structure constant. You can have whatever unit system you want and whatever method of organizing the universe as you wish, and that number will be precisely the same.

If you were to meet an alien from a distant star system, you'd have a pretty hard time communicating the value of the speed of light. Once you nailed down how we express our numbers, you would then have to define things like meters and seconds.

But the fine structure constant? You could just spit it out, and they would understand it (as long as they count numbers the same way as we do).

Sommerfeld originally didn't put much thought into the constant, but as our understanding of the quantum world grew, the fine-structure constant started appearing in more and more places. It seemed to crop up anytime charged particles interacted with light. In time, we came to recognize it as the fundamental measure for the strength of how charged particles interact with electromagnetic radiation.

Change that number, change the universe. If the fine-structure constant had a different value, then atoms would have different sizes, chemistry would completely change and nuclear reactions would be altered. Life as we know it would be outright impossible if the fine-structure constant had even a slightly different value.

So why does it have the value it does? Remember, that value itself is important and might even have meaning, because it exists outside any unit system we have. It simply is.

In the early 20th century, it was thought that the constant had a value of precisely 1/137. What was so important about 137? Why that number? Why not literally any other number? Some physicists even went so far as to attempt numerology to explain the constant's origins; for example, famed astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington "calculated" that the universe had 137 * 2^256 protons in it, so "of course" 1/137 was also special.

Today, we have no explanation for the origins of this constant. Indeed, we have no theoretical explanation for its existence at all. We simply measure it in experiments and then plug the measured value into our equations to make other predictions.

Someday, a theory of everything a complete and unified theory of physics might explain the existence of the fine-structure constant and other constants like it. Unfortunately, we don't have a theory of everything, so we're stuck shrugging our shoulders.

But at least we know what to write on our greeting cards to the aliens.

Learn more by listening to the "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, available oniTunesand askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

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Life as we know it would not exist without this highly unusual number - Space.com

Within mathematics, there is a vast and ever expanding web of conjectures, theorems and ideas called the Langlands program. That program links seemingly disconnected subfields. It is such a force that some mathematicians say itor some aspect of itbelongs in the esteemed ranks of the Millennium Prize Problems, a list of the top open questions in math. Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has even dubbed the Langlands program a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics.

The program is named after Robert Langlands, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Four years ago, he was awarded the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, for his program, which was described as visionary.

Langlands is retired, but in recent years the project has sprouted into almost its own mathematical field, with many disparate parts, which are united by a common wellspring of inspiration, says Steven Rayan, a mathematician and mathematical physicist at the University of Saskatchewan. It has many avatars, some of which are still open, some of which have been resolved in beautiful ways.

Increasingly mathematicians are finding links between the original programand its offshoot, geometric Langlandsand other fields of science. Researchers have already discovered strong links to physics, and Rayan and other scientists continue to explore new ones. He has a hunch that, with time, links will be found between these programs and other areas as well. I think were only at the tip of the iceberg there, he says. I think that some of the most fascinating work that will come out of the next few decades is seeing consequences and manifestations of Langlands within parts of science where the interaction with this kind of pure mathematics may have been marginal up until now. Overall Langlands remains mysterious, Rayan adds, and to know where it is headed, he wants to see an understanding emerge of where these programs really come from.

The Langlands program has always been a tantalizing dance with the unexpected, according to James Arthur, a mathematician at the University of Toronto. Langlands was Arthurs adviser at Yale University, where Arthur earned his Ph.D. in 1970. (Langlands declined to be interviewed for this story.)

I was essentially his first student, and I was very fortunate to have encountered him at that time, Arthur says. He was unlike any mathematician I had ever met. Any question I had, especially about the broader side of mathematics, he would answer clearly, often in a way that was more inspiring than anything I could have imagined.

During that time, Langlands laid the foundation for what eventually became his namesake program. In 1969Langlands famously handwrote a 17-page letter to French mathematician Andr Weil. In that letter, Langlands shared new ideas that later became known as the Langlands conjectures.

In 1969 Langlands delivered conference lectures in which he shared the seven conjectures that ultimately grew into the Langlands program, Arthur notes. One day Arthur asked his adviser for a copy of a preprint paper based on those lectures.

He willingly gave me one, no doubt knowing that it was beyond me, Arthur says. But it was also beyond everybody else for many years. I could, however, tell that it was based on some truly extraordinary ideas, even if just about everything in it was unfamiliar to me.

Two conjectures are central to the Langlands program. Just about everything in the Langlands program comes in one way or another from those, Arthur says.

The reciprocity conjecture connects to the work of Alexander Grothendieck, famous for his research in algebraic geometry, including his prediction of motives. I think Grothendieck chose the word [motive] because he saw it as a mathematical analogue of motifs that you have in art, music or literature: hidden ideas that are not explicitly made clear in the art, but things that are behind it that somehow govern how it all fits together, Arthur says.

The reciprocity conjecture supposes these motives come from a different type of analytical mathematical object discovered by Langlands called automorphic representations, Arthur notes. Automorphic representation is just a buzzword for the objects that satisfy analogues of the Schrdinger equation from quantum physics, he adds. The Schrdinger equation predicts the likelihood of finding a particle in a certain state.

The second important conjecture is the functoriality conjecture, also simply called functoriality. It involves classifying number fields. Imagine starting with an equation of one variable whose coefficients are integerssuch as x2 + 2x + 3 = 0and looking for the roots of that equation. The conjecture predicts that the corresponding field will be the smallest field that you get by taking sums, products and rational number multiples of these roots, Arthur says.

With the original program, Langlands discovered a whole new world, Arthur says.

The offshoot, geometric Langlands, expanded the territory this mathematics covers. Rayan explains the different perspectives the original and geometric programs provide. Ordinary Langlands is a package of ideas, correspondences, dualities and observations about the world at a point, he says. Your world is going to be described by some sequence of relevant numbers. You can measure the temperature where you are; you could measure the strength of gravity at that point, he adds.

With the geometric program, however, your environment becomes more complex, with its own geometry. You are free to move about, collecting data at each point you visit. You might not be so concerned with the individual numbers but more how they are varying as you move around in your world, Rayan says. The data you gather are going to be influenced by the geometry, he says. Therefore, the geometric program is essentially replacing numbers with functions.

Number theory and representation theory are connected by the geometric Langlands program. Broadly speaking, representation theory is the study of symmetries in mathematics, says Chris Elliott, a mathematician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Using geometric tools and ideas, geometric representation theory expands mathematicians understanding of abstract notions connected to symmetry, Elliot notes. That area of representation theory is where the geometric Langlands program lives, he says.

The geometric program has already been linked to physics, foreshadowing possible connections to other scientific fields.

In 2018 Kazuki Ikeda, a postdoctoral researcher in Rayans group, published a Journal of Mathematical Physics study that he says is connected to an electromagnetic duality that is a long-known concept in physics and that is seen in error-correcting codes in quantum computers, for instance. Ikeda says his results were the first in the world to suggest that the Langlands program is an extremely important and powerful concept that can be applied not only to mathematics but also to condensed-matter physicsthe study of substances in their solid stateand quantum computation.

Connections between condensed-matter physics and the geometric program have recently strengthened, according to Rayan. In the last year the stage has been set with various kinds of investigations, he says, including his own work involving the use of algebraic geometry and number theory in the context of quantum matter.

Other work established links between the geometric program and high-energy physics. In 2007 Anton Kapustin, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Edward Witten, a mathematical and theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, published what Rayan calls a beautiful landmark paper that paved the way for an active life for geometric Langlands in theoretical high-energy physics. In the paper, Kapustin and Witten wrote that they aimed to show how this program can be understood as a chapter in quantum field theory.

Elliott notes that viewing quantum field theory from a mathematical perspective can help glean new information about the structures that are foundational to it. For instance, Langlands may help physicists devise theories for worlds with different numbers of dimensions than our own.

Besides the geometric program, the original Langlands program is also thought to be fundamental to physics, Arthur says. But exploring that connection may require first finding an overarching theory that links the original and geometric programs, he says.

The reaches of these programs may not stop at math and physics. I believe, without a doubt, that [they] have interpretations across science, Rayan says. The condensed-matter part of the story will lead naturally to forays into chemistry. Furthermore, he adds, pure mathematics always makes its way into every other area of science. Its only a matter of time.

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The Evolving Quest for a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics - Scientific American

Layne Hartsell talked quantum physics in the Metaverse with Dr. Jan Krikke, spokesperson for the Dutch Institute of Advanced Physics in the Metaverse. Today, he is in Stockholm, Sweden representing the Dutch Institute at the Knorklund Institute for Alternative Physics at the Metaverse Conference

Layne Hartsell (LH):Good morning, Dr. Krikke. You are the spokesperson for the Knorklund Institute and you are attending the Metaverse Conference. Can you talk about the current ideas and who is presenting?

Jan Krikke (JK): Good morning Layne. Thanks for having me.Yes, of course. We have been deeply concerned about the direction of quantum physics in recent years. Attempts to develop a Theory of Everything that combine Einsteins Relativity Theory and the Standard Model have not had the hoped-for result in the past 100 years. So the question facing us today is whether we should continue this quest for another century, all the more so in light of recent technological and scientific developments like artificial intelligence and especially the metaverse. By the year 2122, most of the worlds population will be fully immersed in the metaverse. So, that was a big consideration for us. Metav Corporation chief technological officer Steven Stills very much agrees with our view and we invited him to give a presentation at our conference. We also have representatives from the Free Republic of Liberland, the first nation to proclaim independence in the Metaverse.

LH: Quantum mechanics is about 100 years old and there have been advances beyond General Relativity; quantum mechanics is in our computers, for example. Physicist David Deutsche says that philosophers and scientists have wondered about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics when a tiny subset of calculations out of all possible mathematical relations make up physics. Mathematics and physics work; however, the world is not computational.

What are you seeing at the conference? Does anyone there mind the matter? I had heard that people wanted to let the Theory of Everything go and then work on something else more interesting.

JK: The conference discussed the distinction between the applied and theoretical aspects of science. When you launch a rocket into space, its mostly Newtonian physics with a bit of quantum physics thrown in. Both have their uses. But quantum theory has frankly been a mess. We build complex mathematical structures hoping to build a bridge between Relativity and the Standard Model but we build a huge mathematical edifice that was increasingly removed from experiential reality. So we say, why not explore other avenues? Thats how we got to the metaverse.

LH: So lets do away with quantum physics like the one major university in the US that closed their physics department recently saying that the metaverse is it, a new physics? Nonsense. CERN physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder has provided a clarification of quantum physics not doing away with it when she talks about being lost in mathematics.

JK: We just need a fresh start. The old approach to physics reached a ceiling. String Theory was probably our best hope but we have to be realistic. In hindsight, we can say we were grasping at straws. As a colleague at Princeton University put it to me bluntly, Forget String Theory. You dont need it in the metaverse. I fully agree. We have to look at the future.

LH: Ah, ok I get it. I mean they already got rid of politics and then they got rid of empirical reality. Why not physics? What you are saying is we need an entirely new physics. We wont get rid of physics, we will transform it in a meta kind of way. We can see it already happening? Tell me more, I am on the verge of being convinced.

JK: The physics community is reexamining everything, including its terminology. For example, we may have to get rid of the word physics. It has no place in the metaverse. The word physics belongs to Newtonian physics. It refers to things that are material, tangible, and measurable. This idea carried over into quantum physics where nothing is tangible. All that knowledge is of little value today. To give one example: Newton and Einstein had different theories about gravity, but neither theory has any application in the metaverse. We have massive funding coming in and we expect to have a metaverse theory of gravity within the next decade.

LH: That is quite a claim, a new theory of gravity and within a decade. Does Einstein, and more importantly, Bohr, still make any coherence in what is new?

JK: We have to look at this in context. Einstein's work was groundbreaking because it unified space and time. General Relativity was confirmed when scientists showed that light from distant stars is deflected by the sun before it reaches the earth. Thats why we speak of curved space. The metaverse does not have curved space. It would be too disorienting. Nor will it accommodate Bohr's Standard Model. The two theories are incompatible. The metaverse will be a harmonious, unified world without such dichotomies. We will first develop a metaverse theory of gravity and then a metaverse standard model to make sure it harmonizes with metaverse gravity. We do believe that if Einstein and Bohr were alive today, they would have enthusiastically participated in our efforts.

LH: I see. So we will let go of these notions of uniformity to nature because, really everyone knows that reality is anything goes. The scientists are all deluded with their thermodynamics, equations, and then integrations with chemistry. What is real is the metaverse and those laws that are metaversal. Am I getting the picture now?

JK: Yes, thats been the growing consensus in the physics community. Were re-imagining physics to reflect our own new reality. The thermodynamic description of gravity has a history that goes back to research on black hole thermodynamics by Hawking and Bekenstein in the mid-1970s. These studies suggest a connection between thermodynamics and gravity. But the metaverse theory of gravity will make their work irrelevant. Traditional physics became too disjointed. Scientists worked on many small pieces of the puzzle but failed to see the bigger picture. Metaverse physics will not make this error. It starts with the big picture and lets the smaller pieces fall into place. Individuals make it up as they go along. Thats a fundamentally different approach.

LH: Im really getting it now. Certainly climate change is not even a hoax, it couldnt even exist. Those people who have faith in climate change science are too simple to understand the new metaverse approach. We truly make up our own reality, create wealth and happiness in nearly an instant due to the new laws of the metaverse. I always thought that physicist and philosopher, David Albert, had missed the point. The metaverse really is magic.

JK: Yes, we could even say that in the metaverse, magic becomes reality. David Albert, like most of his peers, are really pre-metaverse thinkers. They argue mostly on the basis of mathematical logic, as if mathematics is an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Actually, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder touched on this in her book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Albert argues that the quantum world fundamentally consists of, wait for it, a complex-valued field that exists in an extremely high-dimensional space. The idea of high-dimensional space, whatever it means, exists only in the world of mathematics. It is non-Euclidean geometry gone haywire. It had no meaning in quantum physics and it will have no place in metaverse physics. We will use post-Euclidan geometry.

LH: Well, I just think they didnt quite get it; they seem to intuit the metaverse. I suppose one has to be on the extraterrestrial celebrity level of the metaverse. The metaversals are the enlightened self-interest freeing us from empirical reality.

JK: Albert looked at complex philosophical issues like a scientist. He argued that the difference between the past and the future can be understood "as a mechanical phenomenon of nature." In the metaverse, discussions about the past and future will be seen as mental distractions from "the immediacy of now." Adam Smith took baby steps that ultimately led to the metaverse, but in the metaverse, economics will be replaced by virtual abundance. The metaverse will abandon all dualities, whether demand and supply or physics and metaphysics. There are the Masters of the Metaverse. They work to ease people into a metaverse mindset. Empirical reality will be replaced by metaverse reality. Old school scientists have used empirical science to debate whether or not God exists. In the metaverse, everyone has God-like qualities, so discussions about the existence of God will no longer be relevant.

LH: Thank-you for your insights and may we all practice more mindfulness or should I say meta-mindfulness.

Jan Krikke is a former Japan correspondent for various European, American, Asian media, former managing editor of Asia 2000 in Hong Kong, and the author of five books. He has also written about the future of AI, the problems with quantum physics, and the cultural dimension of consciousness. He currently is ad-hoc chairman of The Metaverse Transition Committee based in Liberland.

Layne Hartsell is a research professor at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and at the Asia Institute, Berlin/Tokyo. He is also a new member of the metavetic sect, working with their new nanoscience group - a meta-faith organization devoted to god knows what.

This article is satire.

Korea IT Times

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Modern Physics? Time to End the Quest - Korea IT Times

A paper on the experiment titled "Experimental protocol for testing the mass-energy-information equivalence principle" has been published in the journal AIP Advances.

Dr. Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth has devised an experiment which could demonstrate information as a fifth state of matter, alongside solids, liquids, gases and plasma. Dr. Vopson has previously published research which suggests that information has mass, and that all elementary particles store information in a similar way to DNA in humans.

"This would be a eureka moment because it would change physics as we know it and expand our understanding of the universe. But it wouldn't conflict with any of the existing laws of physics. It doesn't contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics or classical mechanics. All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting," said Dr. Vopson.

"If we assume that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves, how can we prove it? My latest paper is about putting these theories to the test so they can be taken seriously by the scientific community," Dr. Vopson continued.

The experiment will use particle-antiparticle collisions to detect and measure the information stored in an elementary particle. Colliding these particles will annihilate them, converting them into energy, typically gamma photons. According to Dr. Vopson, the information from the particle will have to go somewhere, and it will be converted into low-energy infrared photons which can be measured.

You can read more from the study here.

Excerpt from:

Scientists conduct experiment that may change physics forever - TweakTown