The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second. Abraham Lincoln was 6 feet 6 inches tall. Most numbers come with dimensions. But it turns out that when you combine the quantities that make up alpha, all the units cancel! One hundred thirty-seven comes by itself; it shows up naked all over the place. This means that scientists on Mars, or on the fourteenth planet of the star Sirius, using whatever god-awful units they have for charge, speed, and their version of Planck's constant, will also get 137. It is a pure number.
Physicists have agonized over 137 for the past fifty years. Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained. I tell my undergraduate students that if they are ever in trouble in a major city anywhere in the world they should write "137" on a sign and hold it up at a busy street corner. Eventually a physicist will see that they're distressed and come to their assistance. (No one to my knowledge has ever tried this, but it should work.)
One of the wonderful (but unverified) stories in physics emphasizes the importance of 137 as well as illustrating the arrogance of theorists. According to this tale, a notable Austrian mathematical physicist of Swiss persuasion, Wolfgang Pauli, went to heaven, we are assured, and, because of his eminence in physics, was given an audience with God.
"Pauli, you're allowed one question. What do you want to know?"
Pauli immediately asked the one question that he had labored in vain to answer for the last decade of his life. "Why is alpha equal to one over one hundred thirty-seven?"
God smiled, picked up the chalk, and began writing equations on the blackboard. After a few minutes, She turned to Pauli, who waved his hand. "Das ist falsch!" [That's baloney!]
There's a true story also—a verifiable story—that takes place here on earth. Pauli was in fact obsessed with 137, and spent countless hours pondering its significance. The number plagued him to the very end. When Pauli's assistant visited the theorist in the hospital room in which he was placed prior to his fatal operation, Pauli instructed the assistant to note the number on the door as he left. The room number was 137.
That's where I lived: 137 Eola Road.
LATE NIGHT WITH LEDERMAN
Returning home one weekend night after a late supper in Batavia, I drove through the lab grounds. From several points on Eola Road, one can see the central lab building lit up against the prairie sky. Wilson Hall at 11:30 on a Sunday night is testimony to how strongly physicists feel about solving the remaining mysteries of the universe. Lights were blazing up and down the sixteen floors of the twin towers, each containing its quota of bleary-eyed researchers trying to work out the kinks in our opaque theories about matter and energy. Fortunately, I could drive home and go to bed. As director of the lab, my night-shift obligations were drastically reduced. I was able to sleep on problems rather than work on them. I was grateful that night to lie on a real bed rather than having to bunk down on the accelerator floor waiting for the data to come in. Nevertheless, I tossed and turned, worrying about quarks, Gina, leptons, Sophia ... Finally, I resorted to counting sheep to get my mind off physics: "...134, 135, 136, 137..."
Suddenly I rose from between the sheets, a sense of urgency driving me from the house. I pulled my bicycle out of the barn, and—still clad in pajamas, my medals falling from my lapels as I pedaled—I rode in painfully slow motion toward the collider detector facility. It was frustrating. I knew I had some very important business to attend to, but I just couldn't get the bike to move any faster. Then I remembered what a psychologist had told me recently: that there is a kind of dream, called a lucid dream, in which the dreamer knows he is in a dream. Once you know this, said the psychologist, you can do anything you want inside the dream. The first step is to find some clue that you're dreaming and are not in real life. That was easy. I knew damn well this was a dream because of the italics. I hate italics. Too hard to read. I took control of my dream. "No more italics!" I screamed.
There. That's better. I put the bike into high gear and pedaled at light speed (hey, you can do anything in a dream) toward the CDF. Oops, too fast: I had circled the earth eight times and ended up back home. I geared down and pedaled at a gentle 120 miles per hour to the facility. Even at three in the morning the parking lot was fairly full; at accelerator labs the protons don't stop at nightfall.
Whistling a ghostly little tune, I entered the detector facility. The CDF is an industrial hangar-like building, with everything painted bright orange and blue. The various offices, computer rooms, and control rooms are all along one wall; the rest of the building is open space, designed to accommodate the detector, a three-story-tall, 5,000-ton instrument. It took some two hundred physicists and an equal number of engineers more than eight years to assemble this particular 10-million-pound Swiss watch. The detector is multicolored, radial in design, its components extending out symmetrically from a small hole in the center. The detector is the crown jewel of the lab. Without it, we cannot "see" what goes on in the accelerator tube, which passes through the center of the detector's core. What goes on, dead center in the detector, are the head-on collisions of protons and antiprotons. The radial spokes of the detector elements roughly match the radial spray of hundreds of particles produced in the collision.
The detector moves on rails that allow the enormous device to be moved out of the accelerator tunnel to the assembly floor for periodic maintenance. We usually schedule maintenance for the summer months, when electric rates are highest (when your electric bill runs more than $10 million a year you do what you can to cut costs). On this night the detector was on-line. It had been moved back into the tunnel, and the passageway to the maintenance room had been plugged with a 10-foot-thick steel door that blocks the radiation. The accelerator is so designed that the protons and antiprotons collide (mostly) in the section of pipe that runs through the detector—the "collision region." The job of the detector, obviously, is to detect and catalogue the products of the head-on collisions between protons and p-bars (antiprotons).
Still in my pajamas, I made my way up to the second-floor control room, where the findings of the detector are continuously monitored. The room was quiet, as one would expect at this hour. No welders or other workmen roamed the facility making repairs or performing other maintenance tasks, as is common during the day shift. As usual, the lights in the control room were dim, to better see and read the distinctive bluish glow of dozens of computer monitors. The computers in the CDF control room are Macintoshes, just like the microcomputers you might buy to keep track of your finances or to play Cosmic Ozmo. They are fed information from a humongous "home-built" computer that works in tandem with the detector to sort through the debris created by the collisions between protons and antiprotons. The home-built thing is actually a sophisticated data acquisition system, or DAQ, designed by some of the brightest scientists in the fifteen or so universities around the world that collaborated to build the CDF monster. The DAQ is programmed to decide which of the hundreds of thousands of collisions each second are interesting or important enough to analyze and record on magnetic tape. The Macintoshes monitor the great variety of subsystems that collect data.
I surveyed the room, scanning the numerous empty coffee cups and the small band of young physicists, simultaneously hyper and exhausted, the result of too much caffeine and too many hours on shift. At this hour you find graduate students and young postdocs (new Ph.D.'s), who don't have enough seniority to draw decent shifts. Notable was the number of young women, a rare commodity in most physics labs. CDF's aggressive recruiting has paid off to the pleasure and profit of the group.
Over in the corner sat a man who didn't quite fit in. He was thin with a scruffy beard. He didn't look that different from the other researchers, but somehow I knew he wasn't a member of the staff.
Maybe it was the toga. He sat staring into the Macintosh, giggling nervously. Imagine, laughing in the CDF control ro
om! At one of the greatest experiments science has ever devised! I thought I'd better put my foot down.
LEDERMAN: Excuse me. Are you the new mathematician they were supposed to send over from the University of Chicago?
GUY IN TO GA: Right profession, wrong town. Name's Democritus. I hail from Abdera, not Chicago. They call me the Laughing Philosopher.
LEDERMAN: Abdera?
DEMOCRITUS: Town in Thrace, on the Greek mainland.
LEDERMAN: I don't remember requisitioning anyone from Thrace. We don't need a Laughing Philosopher. At Fermilab I tell all the jokes.
DEMOCRITUS: Yes, I've heard of the Laughing Director. Don't worry about it. I doubt if I'll be here long. Not given what I've seen so far.
LEDERMAN: SO why are you taking up space in the control room?
DEMOCRITUS: I'm looking for something. Something very small.
LEDERMAN: You've come to the right place. Small is our specialty.
DEMOCRITUS: So I'm told. I've been looking for this thing for twenty-four hundred years.
LEDERMAN: Oh, you're that Democritus.
DEMOCRITUS: You know another one?
LEDERMAN: I get it. You're like the angel Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life, sent here to talk me out of suicide. Actually, I was thinking about slicing my wrists. We can't find the top quark.
DEMOCRITUS: Suicide! You remind me of Socrates. No, I'm no angel. That immortality concept came after my time, popularized by that softhead Plato.
LEDERMAN: But if you're not immortal, how can you be here? You died over two millennia ago.
DEMOCRITUS: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
LEDERMAN: Sounds familiar.
DEMOCRITUS: Borrowed it from a guy I met in the sixteenth century. But to answer your question, I'm doing what you call time traveling.
LEDERMAN: Time traveling? You figured out time travel in fifth-century-B.C. Greece?
DEMOCRITUS: Time is a piece of cake. It goes forward, it goes backward. You ride it in and out, like your California surfers. It's matter that's hard to figure. Why, we even sent some of our graduate students to your era. One, Stephenius Hawking, made quite a stir, I've heard. He specialized in "time." We taught him everything he knows.
LEDERMAN: Why didn't you publish this discovery?
DEMOCRITUS: Publish? I wrote sixty-seven books and would have sold a bunch, but the publisher just refused to advertise. Most of what you know about me you know through Aristotle's writings. But let me fill you in a little. I traveled—boy, did I travel! I covered more territory than any man in my time, making the most extensive investigations, and saw more climes and countries, and listened to more famous men...
LEDERMAN: But Plato hated your guts. Is it true he disliked your ideas so much that he wanted all your books burned?
DEMOCRITUS: Yes, and that superstitious old goat nearly succeeded. And then that fire in Alexandria really cooked my reputation. That's why you so-called moderns are so ignorant of time manipulation. Now all I hear about is Newton, Einstein...
LEDERMAN: So why this visit to Batavia in the 1990s?
DEMOCRITUS: Just checking up on one of my ideas, an idea that was unfortunately abandoned by my countrymen.
LEDERMAN: I bet you're speaking of the atom, the atomos.
DEMOCRITUS: Yes, the a-tom, the ultimate, indivisible, and invisible particle. The building block of all matter. I've been jumping ahead through time, to see how far man has come with refining my theory.
LEDERMAN: And your theory was...
DEMOCRITUS: You're baiting me, young man! You know very well what I believed. Don't forget, I've been time-hopping century by century, decade by decade. I'm well aware that the nineteenth-century chemists and the twentieth-century physicists have been playing around with my ideas. Don't get me wrong—you were right to do so. If only Plato had been as wise.
LEDERMAN: I just wanted to hear it in your own words. We know of your work primarily through the writings of others.
DEMOCRITUS: Very well. Here we go for the umpteenth time. If I sound bored, it's because I recently went through this with that fellow Oppenheimer. Just don't interrupt me with tedious musings about the parallels between physics and Hinduism.
LEDERMAN: Would you like to hear my theory about the role of Chinese food in mirror-symmetry violation? It's as valid as saying the world is made of air, earth, fire, and water.
DEMOCRITUS: Why don't you just keep quiet and let me start from the beginning. Here, take a seat next to this Macintosh thing and pay attention. Now, if you're going to understand my work, and the work of all of us atomists, we have to go back twenty-six hundred years. We have to start about two hundred years before I was born, with Thales, who flourished around 600 B.C. in Miletus, a hick town in Ionia, which you now call Turkey.
LEDERMAN: Thales was a philosopher, too?
DEMOCRITUS: And how! He was the first Greek philosopher. But philosophers in pre-Socratic Greece really knew a lot of things. Thales was an accomplished mathematician and astronomer. He sharpened his training in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Did you know he predicted an eclipse of the sun that occurred at the close of the war between the Lydians and Medes? He constructed one of the first almanacs—I understand you leave this task to farmers today—and he taught our sailors how to steer a ship at night by using the Little Bear constellation. He was also a political adviser, a shrewd businessman, and a fine engineer. Early Greek philosophers were respected not only for the aesthetic workings of their minds but also for their practical arts, or applied science, as you would put it. Is it any different today with physicists?
LEDERMAN: We have been known to do something useful now and then. But I'm sorry to say that our achievements are usually very narrowly focused, and very few of us know Greek.
DEMOCRITUS: Lucky for you I speak English then, yes? Anyhow, Thales, like me, kept asking himself a primary question: "What is the world made of, and how does it work?" Around us we see apparent chaos. Flowers bloom, then die. Floods destroy the land. Lakes become deserts. Meteors fall out of the sky. Whirlwinds appear apparently out of nowhere. From time to time a mountain explodes. Men grow old and turn to dust. Is there something permanent, an underlying identity, that persists through this constant change? Can all of this be reduced to rules so simple that our small minds can understand?
LEDERMAN: Did Thales come up with an answer?
DEMOCRITUS: Water. Thales said water was the primary and ultimate element.
LEDERMAN: How did he figure?
DEMOCRITU'S: It's not such a crazy idea. I'm not totally sure what Thales was thinking. But consider: water is essential to growth, at least among plants. Seeds have a moist nature. Almost anything gives off water when heated. And water is the only substance known that can exist as solid, liquid, or gas—as water vapor or steam. Maybe he figured water could be transformed into earth if this process were carried further. I don't know. But Thales made a very great beginning for what you call science.
LEDERMAN: Not bad for a first try.
DEMOCRITUS: The impression around the Aegean is that Thales and his group were given a bad rap by the historians, especially Aristotle. Aristotle was obsessed by forces, by causation. You can hardly talk to him about anything rise, and he picked on Thales and his friends in Miletus. Why water? And what force causes the change from rigid water to aethereal water? Why so many different forms of water?
LEDERMAN: In modern physics, er, in the physics of these times, forces are required in addition to—
DEMOCRITUS: Thales and his crowd may well have enmeshed the notion of cause into the very nature of his water-based matter. Force and matter unified! Let's save that for later. Then you can tell me about things you call gluons and supersymmetry and—
LEDERMAN [frantically scratching his goose bumps]: Uh, what else did this genius do?
DEMOCRITUS: He had some conventionally mystical ideas. He believed the earth floated on water. He believed that magnets have souls
because they can move iron. But he believed in simplicity, that there is a unity to the universe, even though there are many varied material "things" around us. Thales combined a set of rational arguments with whatever mythological hangovers he had in order to give water a special role.
LEDERMAN: I suppose Thales believed the world was being carried by Atlas standing on a turtle.
DEMOCRITUS: Au contraire. Thales and his pals had this very important meeting, probably in the back room of a restaurant in downtown Miletus. After a certain quantity of Egyptian wine, they threw out Atlas and made a solemn agreement: "From this day forth, explanations and theories of how the world works will be based strictly upon logical arguments. No more superstition. No more appeals to Athena, Zeus, Hercules, Ra, Buddha, Lao-tzu. Let's see if we can find out for ourselves." This may have been the most important agreement ever made by humans. It was 650 B.C., probably a Thursday night, and it was the birth of science.
LEDERMAN: Do you think we've gotten rid of superstition now? Have you met our creationists? Our animal rights extremists?
DEMOCRITUS: Here at Fermilab?
LEDERMAN: No, but not far away. But tell me, when did this earth, air, fire, and water idea come in?
DEMOCRITUS: Hold your horses. There were a couple of other guys before we get to that theory. Anaximander, for one. He was a young associate of Thales' in Miletus. Anaximander also earned his spurs doing practical things, such as constructing a map of the Black Sea for Milesian sailors. Like Thales, he sought a primary building block of matter, but he decided it couldn't be water.
LEDERMAN: Another great advance in Greek thinking, no doubt. What was his candidate, baklava?
DEMOCRITUS: Have your laugh. We'll get to your theories soon enough. Anaximander was another practical genius and, like his mentor Thales, he used his spare time to join in the philosophical debate. Anaximander's logic was fairly subtle. He saw the world as being composed of warring opposites—hot and cold, wet and dry. Water puts out fire; the sun dries up water, et cetera. Therefore the primary substance of the universe cannot be water or fire or anything characterized by one of these opposites. No symmetry there. And you know how we Greeks loved symmetry. For example, if all matter was originally water, as Thales said, then heat or fire could never come into being, since water does not generate fire but obliterates it.
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Page 5
