Born was after a unifying theory to relate all the fundamental forces of nature. He also wanted a theory that would explain where these constants came from. Something, he said, to “explain the existence of the heavy, and light elementary particles and their definite mass quotient 1840."
It might seem a little bizarre that Born worried about a couple of constants. The sciences are full of constants—one defines the speed of light, another quantifies the pull of gravity, and so on. We routinely use these numbers, flipping to dog-eared tables in reference books, and coding them into our software without much thought because, well, they are constants. But the weird thing about such constants is that there is no theory to explain their existence. They are universal and they appear to be unchanging. So is the case with the masses of protons and electrons. But time and time again, they are validated through observation and experiment, not theory.
What Born and so many others were after was a unifying theory that would demonstrate that there could only be one unchanging value for a constant. Without this theory, scientists resort to testing limits of a constant. Measuring the constant is a good way to verify that theories using them make sense, that science stands on firm ground. Error from the measurements can be a huge concern. So, instead of validating the masses of protons and electrons, it's useful to measure the ratio of their masses, a number that is free of the burden of units.
The search for a unifying theory continued. Two years after Born's lecture, his Cambridge colleague, Paul Dirac, wondered in a Nature paper whether the constants were indeed constant if one were to look at the entire history of the cosmos. Measurements on earth are useful but it is a tiny blue dot in the vast universe. What Dirac asked decades ago is what physicists continue to ask today. Is it a constant everywhere in the universe? Why is it a constant? How constant? The question lingered even as the decades rolled on. “The most exact value at present for the ratio of proton to electron mass is 1836.12 +/-0.05,” wrote Friedrich Lenz in a 1951 Physical Review Letters paper. “It may be of interest to note that this number coincides with 6pi^5=1836.12.” That was the entire paper.
- Are the Constants of Physics Constant?
It might seem a little bizarre that Born worried about a couple of constants. The sciences are full of constants—one defines the speed of light, another quantifies the pull of gravity, and so on. We routinely use these numbers, flipping to dog-eared tables in reference books, and coding them into our software without much thought because, well, they are constants. But the weird thing about such constants is that there is no theory to explain their existence. They are universal and they appear to be unchanging. So is the case with the masses of protons and electrons. But time and time again, they are validated through observation and experiment, not theory.
What Born and so many others were after was a unifying theory that would demonstrate that there could only be one unchanging value for a constant. Without this theory, scientists resort to testing limits of a constant. Measuring the constant is a good way to verify that theories using them make sense, that science stands on firm ground. Error from the measurements can be a huge concern. So, instead of validating the masses of protons and electrons, it's useful to measure the ratio of their masses, a number that is free of the burden of units.
The search for a unifying theory continued. Two years after Born's lecture, his Cambridge colleague, Paul Dirac, wondered in a Nature paper whether the constants were indeed constant if one were to look at the entire history of the cosmos. Measurements on earth are useful but it is a tiny blue dot in the vast universe. What Dirac asked decades ago is what physicists continue to ask today. Is it a constant everywhere in the universe? Why is it a constant? How constant? The question lingered even as the decades rolled on. “The most exact value at present for the ratio of proton to electron mass is 1836.12 +/-0.05,” wrote Friedrich Lenz in a 1951 Physical Review Letters paper. “It may be of interest to note that this number coincides with 6pi^5=1836.12.” That was the entire paper.
- Are the Constants of Physics Constant?
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