"Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!"
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Academics from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesNobel laureates in PhysicsNobel laureates from the United StatesPhysicists from the United States
Original Language: English
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On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
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