this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Science Memes

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What is gravity? (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Most of those equations are full of things that can make sense, and then there is a fine structure constant.

It's all over particles, but we don't know what it is. It has no units. It's just a number that is needed for physics to work.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[The Fine-structure Constant] quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.

Why the constant should have this value is not understood, but there are a number of ways to measure its value.

Sounds like we know what it is, we just don't know the reason for its value. (Edit: Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean)

Wikipedia link

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The strangeness of the Fine Structure Constant isn't it's value, it's that we don't know what it is.

Other constants have units that explain what they are doing. Like converting miles to meters we multiply by meters/miles. But this is just a number that is needed. That's so strange I can't think of another example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meh, there's pi, it has no units because it's the ratio of one distance to another...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I feel like this might be another example of OPs meme. Feyman called it a magic number we have no understanding of. It's one of the great mysteries of modern physics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sounds a lot like what we used to call the "fudge factor".