137 - Arthur I. Miller [128]
If one tries hard enough, 137 can be deduced from devilishly complicated combinations of “magic numbers” such as 22 (the first 22 human chromosomes are numbered), 23 (the number of chromosomes from each parent), 28 (the length of a woman’s menstrual cycle), 46 (the number of pairs of chromosomes a person has), 64 (the number of possible values for the 20 amino acids in DNA), and 92 (the number of naturally occurring elements in the periodic table).
Sadly, all these are pure coincidences with no scientific basis. And still 137 continues to tantalize. In fact 137 has become something of a cult. According to one Web site, “The Fine Structure Constant holds a special place among cult numbers. Unlike its more mundane cousins, 17 and 666, the Fine Structure Constant seduces otherwise sane engineers and scientists into seeking mystical truths and developing farfetched theories.”
Enrico Fermi with his incorrect equation for the fine structure constant.
Even Heisenberg had a go, fired by Eddington’s number speculations. In a letter to Bohr in 1935 he reported “playing around” with the fine structure constant, which he expressed as . He was quick to add, “but the other research on it is more serious,” referring to his and Pauli’s attempts to derive it from quantum electrodynamics.
Many years later, Enrico Fermi, the physicist who christened Pauli’s newfound weakly interacting particle the neutrino, was asked to pose for a photograph. He took his place in front of a blackboard on which he had written the fine structure constant—but incorrectly. Instead of he put . ( is shorthand for Planck’s constant h divided by 2: h/2.) It was an excellent joke—and a joke comprehensible only to scientists. However, the joke backfired when the photograph was used for a stamp to commemorate him after his death. So he is caught forever standing next to this iconic equation—incorrectly written.
Surprisingly, 137 also crops up in an entirely different context. In the 1950s, Pauli developed a close friendship with Gershom Scholem, a prominent scholar of Jewish mysticism. When his former assistant Victor Weisskopf went to Jerusalem, Pauli urged him to meet Scholem, though he gave no hint of his own interests in Jewish mysticism. Scholem asked Weisskopf what the deep unsolved problems of physics were. Weisskopf replied, “Well, there’s this number, 137.”
Scholem’s eyes lit up. “Did you know that 137 is the number associated with the Kabbalah?” he asked.
In ancient Hebrew, numbers were written with letters, and each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a number associated with it. Adepts of the philosophical system known as the Gematria add the numbers in Hebrew words and thus find hidden meanings in them. The word Kabbalah is written in Hebrew: is 5, is 30, is 2, and is 100. The four letters add up to…137!
It is an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics. Two key words in the Kabbalah are “wisdom,” which has a numerical value of 73, and “prophesy” (64): 73 + 64 = 137. God himself is One—1—which can also be written 10 (1 + 0 = 10). Take 10’s constituent prime numbers, 3 and 7, and add the original 1: together they can be written 137.
In the bible the key phrase “The God of Truth” (Isaiah 65) adds up to 137. So does “The Surrounding Brightness” (Ezekiel 1) , and the Hebrew word for “crucifix”, .
It turns out that, according to the Gematria, the number content of the letters in the Hebrew word for 137 add up to 1664. This happens to be the numerical value for a portion of the well-known passage from Revelations 13:18: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast.” The rest of the passage reads: “for the number is that of man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
Homing in on the yet more arcane, a group of numerologists noticed that the number 82943 appeared at key places in Aztec and Roman texts and went on to argue that it was a key to a “new universal consciousness.” Their confidence in this assertion was bolstered when they discovered they could relate