History Of Science Quotes

It's true. I doubt. I doubt because I seek the truth. Doubt has served me well.

~ Bradley Steffens

The fine-structure constant is ubiquitous throughout physics. I’ve already noted its connection to the electromagnetic interaction. In atomic physics, the binding energy, fine-structure splitting, and Lamb shift are all proportional to powers of α. In condensed matter physics, α characterizes Josephson junction oscillations and quantum Hall resistance steps. In addition, α is an important component of our system of fundamental constants. [Physics Today]

~ Gerald Gabrielse

Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science.

~ Abhijit Naskar

In a way, the Phi Triangle of the Golden Mean could be compared to the path of light sent forth from the great All-Seeing Eye of God in the beginning, and which paved the way for the creation of the Universe.

~ William Eisen

According to Thoth, because of the placement of the Great Pyramid on the Earth connecting into the Earth's huge geometrical field - specifically the octahedral field of the Earth, which is equivalent to our own fields - and because of the pyramid's mass and the geometries used in it, the white-light energy field spirals upward and becomes extremely strong, stretching all the way out to the center of the galaxy. The dark-light energy comes in from above, spirals through zero point and connects with the center of the Earth. In this way the Great Pyramid connects the center of the Earth to the center of our galaxy.

~ Drunvalo Melchizedek

While twentieth-century physicists were not able to identify any convincing mathematical constants underlying the fine structure, partly because such thinking has normally not been encouraged, a revolutionary suggestion was recently made by the Czech physicist Raji Heyrovska, who deduced that the fine structure constant, ...really is defined by the [golden] ratio ....

~ Carl Johan Calleman

Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.

~ Steven Weinberg

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

The strength of the familiar electromagnetic force between two electrons, for example, is expressed in physics in terms of a constant known as the fine structure constant. The value of this constant, almost exactly 1/137, has puzzled many generations of physicists. A joke made about the famous English physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984), one of the founders of quantum mechanics, says that upon arrival to heaven he was allowed to ask God one question. His question was: Why 1/137?

~ Mario Livio

Science does nothing for man spiritually, and organized religion demands blind faith in illogical liturgy that was never meant to be taken literally!

~ Fred Van Lente

The water beneath the Temple was both actual and metaphorical, existing as springs and streams, as spiritual energy, and as a symbol of the receptive or lunar aspect of nature. The meaning of that principle is too wide and elusive for it to be given any one name, so in the terminology of ancient science it was given a number, 1,080. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. These two numbers, which have an approximate golden-section relationship of 1:1.62, were at the root of the alchemical formula that expressed the supreme purpose of the Temple. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. Not merely was it used to generate energy from fusion of atmospheric and terrestrial currents, but it also served to combine in harmony all the correspondences of those forces on every level of creation.

~ John Michell

The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century. Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology.

~ Gerald Holton

Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ...To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples.

~ Jonathan Black

Since ancient times artists and architects have seen in the golden mean the most aesthetically satisfying geometric ratio.

~ Stephen M. Barr

The prime number 137 had continuously occupied Pauli's mind. It is an approximate value for a constant appearing in the fine structure theory of atomic spectra which in its theoretical expression ties together electromagnetism, relativity and quantum theory. Pauli saw the fine structure theory of spectra as a key in understanding the deepest contemporary problems of theoretical physics. For that reason the number 137 possessed a mysterious attraction for him.

~ K. V. Laurikainen

The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant. ... An expanded form of the constant leads to equations that define the transformation of electromagnetic energy into electron mass/energy, ...

~ Malcolm H. Mac Gregor

In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.

~ Charles P. Enz

... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

~ Wolfgang Pauli

True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.

~ Sheldon L. Glashow

To calculate 'the' fine structure constant, 1/137, we would need a realistic model of just about everything, and this we do not have. In this talk I want to return to the old question of what it is that determines gauge couplings in general, and try to prepare the ground for a future realistic calculation.

~ Steven Weinberg

In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.

~ Marja De Vries

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.

~ Silvan S. Schweber

God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).

~ Paul Davies

Some astrophysicists have convinced themselves that the fifth significant figure of the fine structure constant has changed over the past ten billion years.

~ Sheldon L. Glashow

Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this success of Sommerfeld's fine-structure formula served also as an indirect confirmation of Einstein's relativistic formula for the velocity dependence of inertia mass.

~ Stephen G. Brush

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.

~ Wolfgang Pauli

Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!

~ Fred Van Lente

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

~ Norbert Wiener

The impulse to all movement and all form is given by [the golden ratio], since it is the proportion that summarizes in itself the additive and the geometric, or logarithmic, series.

~ Schwaller De Lubicz

The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller’s (2010) 137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession is Jung and Pauli’smutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher’s stone of the mathematical universe.This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung’s collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy]

~ Todd Hayen

The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.

~ Midhat Gazale

Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers i.e. the ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. after 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation.[Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa]

~ Ahmed Djebbar

To return to the general analysis of the Rosicrucian outlook. Magic was a dominating factor, working as a mathematics-mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mathematics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the supercelestial world. One cannot leave out the angels in this world view, however much it may have been advancing towards the scientific revolution. The religious outlook is bound up with the idea that penetration has been made into higher angelic spheres in which all religions were seen as one; and it is the angels who are believed to illuminate man's intellectual activities.In the earlier Renaissance, the magi had been careful to use only the forms of magic operating in the elemental or celestial spheres, using talismans and various rituals to draw down favourable influences from the stars. The magic of a bold operator like Dee, aims beyond the stars, aims at doing the supercelestial mathematical magic, the angel-conjuring magic. Dee firmly believed that he had gained contact with good angels from whom he learned advancement in knowledge. This sense of close contact with angels or spiritual beings is the hallmark of the Rosicrucian. It is this which infuses his technology, however practical and successful and entirely rational in its new understanding of mathematical techniques, with an unearthly air, and makes him suspect as possibly in contact, not with angels, but with devils.

~ Frances A. Yates