For those who are looking for a provocative weekend diversion: "Quantum" is new nonfiction by Manjit Kumar. I am plodding though it now and find it very well-written but more historical and dry - than "prying". What I was hoping for was new deep insight into reality - and that has not turned up yet.
It puts emphasis on Planck's constant (h) as being more fundamental than other physical constants, c, G, and Boltzmann, etc. I was hoping that it would venture into mysticism a little, and particularly the fine structure constant and Eddington, but nada . that is beyond quantum, so to speak. But to change subjects - Feynman in his '65 Nobel acceptance quipped: "Physicists ought to put a special sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don't know. The message on the sign would be very simple: number 137." First off, the fine structure constant isn't :-) meaning it is not really constant, and supposedly has a value that "must be" determined experimentally but never has - yet, there are many tantalizing natural quantum relationship that get you close to 1/137 - to the extent that anyone with a mystical inclination can come to understand Eddington's fascination with a logical derivation. IJ Good took a stab at this with: "The proton and neutron masses and a conjecture for the gravitational constant" in which he seems to connect c, h, G, the fine-structure constant, and the masses of the electron, proton and neutron. It seems accurate enough to suggest that Eddington's fundamental aim could have been "partly right" . especially if the infamous "hidden variable" is ever fleshed out. If this "Good paper" turns out to be a spoof, and it could be, then it is a sophisticated variety. If you are not trivia challenged, you may remember IJ Good (who died last year) as the originator of the concept: "technological singularity" which was used by Stanley Kubrick in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and presumably is what the monoliths symbolize. He was also bit of a prankster, so we can't be sure he was not following the tradition of by Hans Bethe, who had poked fun at the mystical properties of alpha, as claimed by Eddington - but in a seemingly serious piece for a German journal - very long ago. But - hello - first-off, Hans failed to get the value of absolute zero right (this was pre-War) and as it turns out- there really could be bona fide temperature connection to alpha - although not close to the way Bethe was trying to spoof it, but in the end the joke might be on good-Hans. Well, not really, since by avoiding quantum entanglements, he lived to be 98 (and left us back in 2005) . probably dying with a huge grin on his face, at all of puffery of the so-called 'great debate' which is/was little more than a tempest in teapot. Jones
