!!! - Kragh H. - Magic Number - A Partial History of The Fine-Structure Constant

Arch. Hist. Exact Sci.
57 (2003) 395–431
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s00407-002-0065-7
Magic Number: A Partial History

of the Fine-Structure Constant
Helge Kragh
Communicated by R. Stuewer
Contents
1. Introduction: The fine-structure constant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

2. Between Planck and Sommerfeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396
3. The fine-structure formula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
4. From quantum mechanics to Eddington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
5. Toward quantum electrodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
6. A number derived a priori . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
7. Responses to Eddington’s theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
8. Alpharology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
9. Max Born and the number 137 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
10. Does alpha vary in time? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
11. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
1. Introduction: The fine-structure constant
It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good
physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. . .. It’s one of the greatest
damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by
man. . .. We know what kind of dance to do experimentally to measure this number very
accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on a computer to make this number
come out–without putting it in secretly!1
Thus wrote Richard Feynman in 1983, echoing in his own colourful language what
dozens of theoretical physicists since the early 1930s had said and thought about the
fine-structure constant. In this respect, if not in others, he was just one of a crowd.
Feynman’s magic number, the fine-structure constant, is the dimensionless quantity
α ≡ e2 /h̄ ∼
= 1/137
1
R. P. Feynman, QED. The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), p. 129.
396 H. Kragh
with e the elementary charge, c the speed of light in vacuum, and h̄ Planck’s constant
(≡ h/2π ). In SI units the expression is e2 /4πεo h̄c, with εo the vacuum permitivity. The
number signifies the electromagnetic coupling constant, meaning that it characterizes
the strength of all interactions between charged elementary particles and the electro-
magnetic field (photons). Moreover, α is a small number compared to 1, which is the
reason why perturbation theory can be applied in quantum electrodynamics and make it
a sensible theory. In the expression e2 /h̄c, the denominator is not considered important
but usually taken to be just a scale factor for e2 . The name fine-structure constant is a relic
from the constant’s past, a reminder that it first turned up in the context of spectroscopy,
as we shall see in what follows. The constant, often given by its reciprocical, is today
known with extremely good accuracy. Its modern (1998) value is
α −1 = 137.035 999 76 ± 0.000 000 50,
which is in perfect agreement with calculations of quantum electrodynamics.2
As seen from a modern perspective, the fine-structure constant is not quite as magic
as it used to be. The reasons are threefold. First, α is only one out of four coupling
constants, the other three (αw αs and αg ) being defined in analogy with α and referring
to the weak, strong and gravitational interactions. Second, the measured or “effective” α
is not strictly a constant because its value depends on the energy at which it is measured.
The inverse fine-structure coupling constant is only equal to α −1 at low energies or
small momentum transfers, whereas for very high energies it will decrease below 137.
For example, at an energy of about 81 GeV, corresponding to the mass of the W boson,
the effective α −1 will be approximately 128. At grand unification energy, α is supposed
to have been equal in value to αw and αs . Thus, the mysterious number 137 is a limiting
case and merely reflects that we live in a low-energy world. Third, recent measurements
strongly indicate that α is a “historical” quantity, that is, has evolved over time and been
greater in the past (see section 10).
Although α thus has lost part of its magic, it is still a fundamental and unexplained
number that physicists very much want to understand. Whatever its current status, it
has an interesting history that goes back to the earliest days of quantum theory and
illuminates important episodes in the history of modern physics. This essay examines
the historical development of the fine-structure constant until about 1960 and the role it
played in shaping parts of theoretical physics.
2. Between Planck and Sommerfeld
It is only with hindsight that the fine-structure constant, or traces of it, can be found
in works before 1916, the year in which Sommerfeld explicitly introduced it in the form
we know it today. Yet, considerations about the interrelationship between Planck’s new
constant and other natural constants go back to the very birth of quantum theory and some
of these reasonably can be seen as foreshadowing the idea of the fine-structure constant.
Although Max Planck cannot be considered a precursor of the fine-structure constant,
his deep interest in the natural constants and their interrelationships is worth notice in the
2
Toichiro Kinoshita, “The fine-structure constant,” Reports of Progress in Physics 59 (1996),
1459–1492. See also http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/alpha.html
Magic Number: A Partial History of the Fine-Structure Constant 397
present context. As early as 1899, at a time when the quantum of action h had not been
introduced explicitly, he suggested that the theory of blackbody radiation indicated a sys-
tem of “natural units of measure,” namely the system later known as the Planck units.3
The system incorporated what in 1900 would be the constants h, c, k (Boltzmann’s con-
stant), and G (Newton’s constant of gravitation), but not the elementary charge e. The
first time that Planck explicitly wrote his natural units in terms of the new constants was
in 1906, in his book on heat radiation.4 Here appears, for example, the natural length
unit as P = (hG/c3 )1/2 , the value of which Planck stated as 4.03 · 10−33 cm. This is
what is currently known as the Planck length, except that today the unit is usually given
as (h̄G/c3 )1/2 = 1.62 · 10−35 m. Whereas Planck looked for relationships between the
constants of nature, he paid no particular attention to the dimensionless combinations
of constants.5
Planck’s continual interest in the natural constants is evident also in his publications
of 1900, in which he introduced energy quantization. It is further demonstrated by a
letter he wrote to Paul Ehrenfest on 6 July 1905, at a time when h had been recognised to
be a fundamental yet still mysterious constant of nature. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “not
completely impossible that this assumption (the existence of an elementary quantum
of electricity) offers a bridge to the existence of an elementary energetic quantum h,
in particular since h has the same order of magnitude as e2 /c.”6 Naturally, Planck also
was aware that the two quantities have the same dimensions, that of an action. He was a
great believer in invariants and considered universal constants and the principle of least
action to be the very cornerstones of physics.7
3
M. Planck, “Über irreversible Strahlungsvorgänge. 5. Mitteilung,” Preussische Akademie
der Wissenschafften, Sitzungsberichte (1899), 440–480. For the historical background, see Genn-
ady E. Gorelik, “The first steps of quantum gravity and the Planck values,” in Jean Eisenstaedt
and Anne J. Kox, eds., Studies in the History of General Relativity (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1992)
pp. 367–382; Nadia Robotti, “The search for universal constants and the birth of quantum me-
chanics,” in Claudio Garola and Arcangelo Rossi, eds., The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics:
Historical Analysis and Open Questions (Singapore: World Scientific, 2000) pp. 343–354; and N.
Robotti and Massimiliano Badino, “Max Planck and the ‘constants of nature’,” Annals of Science
58 (2001), 137–162.
4
M. Planck, Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Wärmestrahlung (Leipzig: Ambrosius Barth,
1906), paragraph 159. Planck’s units received support from Paul Drude in his The Theory of Optics
(New York: Longmans and Green, 1902), p. 527.
5
In a remarkable paper of 1881, George Johnstone Stoney showed how units of mass, length
and time could be expressed in terms of G, e, and c. G. J. Stoney, “On the physical units of nature,”
Philosophical Magazine 11(1881), 381–390. Although proposed many years before quantum the-
ory, Stoney’s units closely correspond to Planck’s natural units. For the connection, see John
D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature. From Alpha to Omega (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002),
pp. 17–22.
6
Armin Hermann, Frühgeschichte der Quantentheorie 1899–1913 (Mosbach in Baden:
Physik Verlag, 1969), p. 30.
7
For a characteristic example of Planck’s philosophy of nature, see his “Die Stellung der
neueren Physik zur mechanischen Naturanschauung” in M. Planck, Vorträge und Erinnerungen
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlicher Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 52–68, a lecture originally delivered
in 1910.
398 H. Kragh
The first time that Planck’s speculation appeared in print seems to have been in 1909,
in a paper where Einstein summarized the current status of the theory of blackbody ra-
diation. In a side remark, Einstein noted that h = e2 /c is valid as an order-of-magnitude
relation, although “three decimals are missing.”8 In effect, Einstein suggested the re-
lation hc/e2 = , where is a dimensionless factor of the order 1000. But can three
decimals be ignored? H. A. Lorentz thought not, and rejected Einstein’s argument:
I cannot declare myself in agreement with your opinion that h is probably related to ε
(charge of the electron); in any case, I have great doubts. For the three missing decimals
are no small matter. I can imagine that 4π or something on that order comes in as a factor,
but 900 seems too much. . .. It seems more plausible that h is a constant of the ether that
is independent of ε.9
James Jeans, too, was inspired by the theory of blackbody radiation to consider the
meaning of h and its relationship to other constants of nature. In 1913, he speculated
that the relationship
h/2π = (4πe)2 /c or (α −1 =) hc/2π e2 = 16π 2 = 157.9
possibly might be significant. “Is then,” he asked, “the new unit h anything more than a
reappearance of the old unit 4π? Is the apparent atomicity of action or energy or angular
momentum anything more than the atomicity of electricity?”10 He did not follow up his
query.
The implicit introduction of the fine-structure constant into atomic theory probably
should be ascribed to the Austrian physicist Arthur Erich Haas, who in 1910 for the first
time sought a connection between h and atomic structure.11 This he did on the basis of
a Thomson-like model of the hydrogen atom – a single electron moving within a sphere
of positive electricity – which led him to the relation h = 2π e(am)1/2 , where a is the
radius of the hydrogen atom. Haas reasoned that the mass of an electron with radius r
was of electromagnetic origin, meaning that m = 2e2 /3c2 r (the factor 2/3 reflects the
electron’s charge distribution). He pointed out that the quantity hc/e2 is a dimensionless
constant, which he denoted C. From this, he found that
8
A. Einstein, “Zum gegenwärtigen Stand des Strahlungsproblem,” Physikalische Zeitschrift
10 (1909), 185–193, on 192.
9
Lorentz to Einstein, 6 May 1909, in Martin Klein, A. J. Kox, and Robert Schulmann, eds.,
The Collected Works of Albert Einstein, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),
p. 178.
10
J. Jeans, “Discussion on radiation,” Report, British Association of the Advancement of Sci-
ence (1913), 376–386, on p. 380. Jeans, Report on Radiation and the Quantum-Theory (London:
London Physical Society, 1914), pp. 78–79.
11
A. E. Haas, “Über die elektrodynamische Bedeutung des Planck’schen Strahlungsgesetzes
und über eine neue Bestimmung des elektrischen Elementarquantums und der Dimensionen des
Wasserstoffatoms,” Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Sitzungsberichte 119 (1910), 119–144.
Reprinted and commentated in A. Hermann, Arthur Erich Haas. Der Erste Quantenansatz für das
Atom (Stuttgart: Ernst Battenberg, 1965).

C = 2π 2a/3r = 5.13 a/r
From values of a and r accepted at the time (1.88 · 10−8 cm and 1.32 · 10−13 cm,
respectively), he found a value of C corresponding to α −1 = C/2π = 310. However,
Haas did not attach any particular significance to the number, nor had he any reason to
do so. Incidentally, had he used what later became known as the Bohr radius, a = 0.53·
10−8 cm, he would have gotten C/2π = 164. It is sometimes stated that Sommerfeld,
who knew about Haas’s work, introduced the fine-structure constant in 1911, in a lecture
he gave at the 83rd Naturforscherversammlung in Karlsruhe, Germany.12 This however
is a misunderstanding, for at this ocassion Sommerfeld did not refer, either directly or
indirectly, to hc/e2 or similar combinations.
With Niels Bohr’s atomic model of 1913, Planck’s constant was given a new mean-
ing. In contrast to Haas, Bohr stressed that h should be considered an irreducible constant
and not one to be explained in terms of other constants. Although he did not mention the
combination hc/e2 explicitly, it appeared indirectly in his theory of the hydrogen atom,
namely as the orbital velocity of the electron in its ground state relative to the velocity
of light. For n = 1, Bohr’s expression for the orbital velocity was v1 = 2π e2 / h, but in
1913 he did not rewrite it as
v1 = (2πe2 /ch)c = αc
Neither had he any reason to reformulate his energy expression (for n = 1) from
E1 = −2π 2 e4 m/ h2 to E1 = −mc2 α 2 /2
The latter expression demonstrates that the electron’s rest energy relative to its maximum
binding energy is
mc2 /E1 = 2α −2 ∼ = 40, 000
which was only pointed out much later.13 Also the Bohr radius, given by a = h̄2 /me2 ,
can be expressed by the fine-structure constant, namely as a = h̄/mcα. Alternatively it
can be written as
a = α −2 ro
with ro the electron radius e2 /mc2 , which is essentially Haas’s expression of 1910. In
pre-quantum mechanics language it tells us that the linear size of a hydrogen atom in
12
A. Sommerfeld, “Das Plancksche Wirkungsquantum und seine allgemeine Bedeutung für
die Molekularphysik,” Physikalische Zeitschrift 12 (1911), 1057–1069. According to John D. Bar-
row and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986),
p. 223 and p. 360, “Sommerfeld [1911] was the first to spell-out clearly the physical significance
of the dimensionless parameter e2 / hc.” The same erroneous reference occurs in J. D. Barrow,
“The lore of large numbers: Some historical background to the anthropic principle,” Quarterly
Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 22 (1981), 388–420, on 391, and in J. D. Barrow, The
Book of Nothing (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 357.
13
E.g., Robert H. Dicke and James P. Wittke, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1960), p. 11. The same interpretation was pointed out in Max Born, “The
mysterious number 137,” Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences A 2 (1935), 533–561,
and there may have been earlier cases.
400 H. Kragh
its ground state is about 20,000 times the size of an electron. As to the unit of atomic
magnetic moments, the Bohr magneton, it can be written as
µB = eh̄/2mc = ½ α −2 ero
Finally, the constant can be expressed as a ratio between two atomic length units, the
Bohr radius and the Compton wavelength,
α = ⑄/a
where ⑄ = h̄/mc denotes the length unit introduced by Arthur H. Compton in 1923.
In his 1913 trilogy of papers, Bohr ignored effects of special relativity and the fine
structure in hydrogen’s spectrum that had first been observed by Albert Michelson and
Edward Morley in 1887. In a subsequent paper published in February 1915, he realized
that a slightly better agreement with measurements would be obtained if the variation
of the electron’s mass with velocity was taken into account.14 In this first and incom-
plete attempt to incorporate relativity into atomic structure, he found a formula for the
frequency of a hydrogen atom that differed from the 1913 formula by the factor
2 2
πe 1 1
1+ + 2
ch n2 m
where n and m are integral quantum numbers. Moreover, he indicated that for elliptic
orbits the same approach would lead to a doublet structure of the lines, with a frequency
separation of about 2π 2 e4 /n2 c2 h2 “which for n = 2 is of the same order of magnitude
as the doubling of the hydrogen lines observed.” Bohr’s value corresponds to α/8. The
fine-structure constant was almost there, but not quite.
Even before Sommerfeld explicitly introduced the fine-structure constant, the com-
bination of natural constants that defines it was discussed by a few physicists. Their
discussions were not based on either atomic structure or spectroscopy, but rested on
more general considerations of dimensions and units. In a paper submitted in November
1913, Gilbert N. Lewis and Elliot Q. Adams developed a theory of what they called
ultimate rational units, a system in which “all universal constants will prove to be pure
numbers, involving only integral numbers and π .”15 Here is how they argued in their
derivation of Planck’s constant and, indirectly, the fine-structure constant. First they
wrote the constant in Stefan’s law ε = aT 4 (ε = energy density) as a = k 4 (ε/θ 4 )
with θ ≡ kT and noted that the term in the parenthesis has the dimension of (energy ·
length)−3 . Since the square of the electric charge is of dimension (energy · length), they
wrote the constant as
a = (k 4 /e∗6 )(εe∗6 /θ 4 )
where e∗ is the unit charge expressed in a system where e∗ = 4π e. Noting that the term
ae∗6 /k 4 is close to unity, they assumed
14
N. Bohr, “On the series spectrum of hydrogen and the structure of the atom,” Philosophical
Magazine 29 (1915), 332–335.
15
G. N. Lewis and E. Q. Adams, “A theory of ultimate rational units; numerical relations be-
tween elementary charge, Wirkungsquantum, constant of Stefan’s law,” Physical Review 3 (1914),
92–102, on 97.
ae∗6 /k 4 = 1
The Stefan constant a relates to Planck’s constant h by
a = 8π 5 k 4 /15c3 h3
such as Planck had found from integration over his energy distribution formula. From
the two formulae Lewis and Adams got
h = (e∗2 /c)(8π 5 /15)1/3
The equation can be rewritten as
hc/2πe2 = 8π(8π 5 /15)1/3
Remarkably, the numerical value is 137.348, which happens to agree with the mod-
ern value of α −1 within 0.2%! Lewis and Adams observed that their value gave good
agreement for h. They did not predict the still uknown fine-structure constant, but in
retrospect they offered a prediction for the combination hc/2π e2 . They cautioned that
their formula for h might not be correct, for “it seems hardly likely that if h is a quantity
of really fundamental significance it is represented by so complicated a formula.” The
“if” is significant, for at the time Lewis and Adams did not accept the quantum theory.
The two American chemists tended to see not h but e as the fundamental quantity and
suggested that “the so-called ‘Wirkungsquantum’ is merely the square of this fundamen-
tal quantum [e] with a simple numerical coefficient, depending on the units chosen.”
The Lewis-Adams theory of ultimate rational units did not receive much attention, but
in 1919 the American experimentalist Raymond T. Birge adopted their h-formula. He
was clearly impressed that the value of h derived in this way agreed perfectly with that
obtained by different methods.16
If the Lewis-Adams theory can be seen as indirectly referring to the quantity α =
2πe2 /ch, a paper of 1915 by the British physicist Herbert Stanley Allen referred to it
directly.17 Allen discussed the earlier conjectures of Jeans and Lewis and Adams, and
he agreed that the quantity e2 /ch must play some important role. For no obvious reason
he rewrote the Lewis-Adams expression as
2πe2 /ch = (4π)−2 (15/π 2 )1/3
a quantity he called q, but that we (a bit anachronistically) shall refer to as α. Allen

considered the quantity, and especially its square, to be of great importance and noted
how it satisfied to a good approximation
e = 9α 2 · 10−6 and e/m = α 2 · 1022
16
R. T. Birge, “Most probable value of Planck’s constant,” Physical Review 14 (1919),
361–368.
17
H. S. Allen, “Numerical relations between electronic and atomic constants,” Proceedings of
the Physical Society (London) 27 (1915), 425–431.
402 H. Kragh
if the elementary charge is given in electrostatic units (e = 4.80 · 10−10 esu). Moreover,
he noted that the mass of the electron in atomic mass units (0.00055) was close to 10α 2 ,
which is almost the same as
m/M ∼
= 10α 2
with M the proton’s mass. Here we have for the first time a connection between the two
“mysterious” numbers α and M/m, and that even before α had become the fine-structure
constant and the proton got its name.
Yet another paper in the same tradition deserves mention. Arthur C. Lunn, a Chicago
physicist, introduced in 1922 a system of five independent invariants constructed from
the natural constants. One of the dimensionless invariants was Sommerfeld’s α, by then
well known. By comparing it with the other constants and essentially employing the
arguments of Lewis and Adams, he found (in slightly rewritten form) that
α = (15/π 8 212 )1/3 = 7.281 · 10−3
which is just another version of the Lewis-Adams-Allen result. Lunn suggested that
somehow α expressed the so-called packing effect in the atomic nucleus (due to the
binding energy), for, he reasoned, 1 + α + 0.00055 = 1.00784 agreed “with the atomic
weight of hydrogen as closely as that can be considered known.”18 Although he realized
that probably “the true value of S [α] is no. . . simple thing at all,” he could not resist the
temptation to offer several algebraic expressions for α, including
π/24 33 , 7/π 6 , 32/45π 4 , and 32 /53 π 2
For the proton-electron mass ratio he suggested the “practically perfect fit”
M/m = α −2 π/32
which was nearly the same as mentioned by Allen in 1915. Finally, Lunn even considered
a possible relationship between the fine-structure constant and gravitation, namely
G = α 17 /211 π 6
which must have been the first time a connection of this kind was suggested. I invite the
reader to check the numerical accuracy of these early equations.
18
A. C. Lunn, “Atomic constants and dimensional invariants,” Physical Review 20 (1922),
1–14. The packing effect denotes the mass defect of complex nuclei and corresponds to the
energy liberated if a nucleus is split into its parts (m = E/c2 ). It is somewhat surprising that
Lunn considered the packing effect for the simple system of a hydrogen atom. The only kind of
packing effect in a hydrogen atom is the binding energy of the electron, which is negligible.
3. The fine-structure formula
In Munich, Arnold Sommerfeld closely followed Bohr’s work on the hydrogen spec-
trum and in late 1915 had ready a greatly improved theory in which the relativistic mass
variation was fully incorporated into the Bohr theory. He presented his theory to the
Bavarian Academy of Science in two lectures on 6 December 1915 and 8 January 1916.
Both presentations resulted in lengthy papers.19 The main result of Sommerfeld’s elab-
orate calculations was a new formula that expressed the energy of the hydrogen atom in
terms of two quantum numbers, the principal n and the azimuthal k. (For a fixed value of
n, k can attain the values 1, 2,. . ., n.) The famous fine-structure formula for hydrogen-like
atoms reads in its original formulation
−1/2
W (n, k) α2 Z2
= 1+ √ 2 −1 (1)
mo c 2 (n − k) + k 2 − α 2 Z 2
where W = E − Eo is the electron’s binding energy. As a first-order approximation, the

expression reads

RhcZ 2 α2 Z2 n 3
W (n, k) = − 1+ ( − ) (2)
n2 n2 k 4
Here mo denotes the electron’s rest mass and R (or R∞ ) is Rydberg’s constant, R =
2π 2 mo e4 / h3 . The symbol α is what Sommerfeld called the fine-structure constant,
an abbreviation of 2πe2 /ch. It should be pointed out that in his communication of
1915, Sommerfeld defined the fine structure parameter differently, namely as α =
(πe2 /ch)2 = α 2 /4, and that the above formulae only appeared in the Annalen paper
of 1916. Had he kept to his 1915 expression, the later so famous and magic inverse
constant would not have been 137, but 75,076 – hardly a fascinating and “magic” num-
ber! In 1916, Sommerfeld did not introduce originally α as a spectroscopic quantity, but
as the ratio between two angular momenta appearing in the theory of Kepler motion.
The angular momentum for a k = 1 electron is p1 = h/2π and the so-called limiting
momentum is po = e2 / h. Sommerfeld argued that the ratio po /p1 = 2π e2 /ch was the
proper measure for the fine structure.
Because of the increased number of energy levels, it was possible to account for
the doublet structure in the spectra of hydrogen and also the He+ ion. The weak point
in the construction was that the old quantum theory did not predict the intensities of
the spectral lines, but Sommerfeld chose to bypass this difficulty by adopting what he
considered to be reasonable selection rules. He paid particular attention to the energy
difference between the levels (n, k) = (2, 2) and (2, 1) which he found would correspond
19
A. Sommerfeld, “Die Feinstruktur der Wasserstoff- und der Wasserstoff-ähnlichen Linien,”
Akademie der Wissenschaften, München, Sitzungsberichte (1915), 459–500. Sommerfeld, “Zur
Quantentheorie der Spektrallinien,” Annalen der Physik 51 (1916), 1–94. The background for
Sommerfeld’s theory is discussed in Sigeko Nisio, “The formation of the Sommerfeld quantum
theory of 1916,” Japanese Studies in the History of Science 12 (1973), 39–78.
404 H. Kragh
to the red Hα doublet of wavelength 656.28 · 10−9 m. In terms of wave numbers, the
difference is
ν ∗ = Rα 2 Z 4 /16 = 0.365 cm−1 for Z = 1
Friedrich Paschen, who worked in close collaboration with Sommerfeld, was soon able to
confirm the fine structure theory and in May 1916 reported that, “My measurements are
now finished, and they agree everywhere most beautifully with your fine structures.”20
With Sommerfeld’s theory, the combination 2πe2 /ch got a name and a definite physical
meaning, namely, an expression of the doublet width in spectra, in both the optical and
X-ray regions. Moreover, from Paschen’s measurements the numerical value of α now
could be determined directly rather than being based on measurements of e, h and c sep-
arately. In June 1916, Paschen reported the value α 2 = 5.26 · 10−5 or α = 7.25 · 10−3
(corresponding to α −1 = 137.9).21 After the war, the fine structure theory was dissemi-
nated to quantum physicists through Sommerfeld’s highly influential textbook, Atombau
und Spektrallinien. The author first introduced the fine-structure constant in connection
with Bohr’s simple theory, as α = v1 /c, and then in greater detail as a key element in
the relativistic Kepler motion. In the third edition of Atombau of 1922, he reported the
value (7.259 ± 0.005) ·10−3 , or α −1 = 137.76.
Sommerfeld’s theory was hailed as a great progress, the final solution to the problem
of the hydrogen atom and its spectrum. In February 1916, Einstein described the theory
as no less than “a revelation,” and half a year later he wrote to Sommerfeld that, “Your
investigation of the spectra belongs among my most beautiful experiences in physics.
Only through it do Bohr’s ideas become completely convincing.”22 Similar sentiments
were expressed by many other physicists who were greatly impressed by Sommerfeld’s
explanation of one-electron atomic systems. In his Nobel lecture of 1920, Planck praised
Sommerfeld’s Zauberformel and compared it with Urbain LeVerrier’s celebrated 1846
prediction of the planet Neptune.23 According to Haas, echoing the sentiments of the
majority of physicists, Paschen’s measurement “implies a brilliant success not only of
the ideas of Bohr and Sommerfeld but also of the theory of relativity.”24
20
Paschen to Sommerfeld, 21 May 1916, in Michael Eckert and Karl Märker, eds., Arnold
Sommerfeld. Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Band 1: 1892–1918 (Berlin: GNT-Verlag, 2000),
p. 559. The complex interplay between theory and experiment in the development and reception
of the fine structure theory is detailed in Helge Kragh, “The fine structure of hydrogen and the
gross structure of the physics community, 1916–26,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences
16 (1985), 67–125. For an alternative analysis, see N. Robotti, “The hydrogen spectroscopy and
the old quantum mechanics,” Rivista di Storia della Scienza 3 (1986), 45–102.
21
Paschen to Sommerfeld, 20 June 1916, in Eckert and Märker, Arnold Sommerfeld (ref. 20),
p. 562. In his publication, submitted slightly later, Paschen stated the value α = 7.2901 · 10−3
based on the spark spectrum of He+ and α = 7.253 · 10−3 if based on the hydrogen spectrum. See
F. Paschen, “Bohr’s Heliumlinien,” Annalen der Physik 50 (1916), 901–940.
22
Einstein to Sommerfeld, 8 February and 3 August 1916, in Eckert and Märker, Arnold
Sommerfeld (ref. 20), p. 525 and p. 563.
23
Planck, Vorträge und Erinnerungen (ref. 7), pp. 125–138.
24
A. E. Haas, Atomtheorie in Elementare Darstellung (Berlin: Walther de Gruyter, 1924),
p. 45.
Most physicists agreed in the praise, but not all. There also were critical voices, es-
pecially from the group of German physicists who during the early years of the Weimar
Republic sought to prevent the entrance of relativity and quanta into the world of phys-
ics and in general fought to re-establish a classical physics based on the concept of the
ether.25 In the period between 1920 and 1925, hydrogen’s fine structure was the subject
of a major scientific and ideological controversy, mainly because of the relativistic foun-
dation of Sommerfeld’s theory. A decade later, after Weimar Germany had become the
Third Reich, the struggle re-emerged and Sommerfeld and his theory were attacked by
physicists affiliated with the Nazi party and the notorious Deutsche Physik movement.
For example, in 1939 Ludwig Glaser, a party member and a former student of Johannes
Stark, launched a vicious attack in the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft, a
journal devoted to the cause of Aryan or German physics. According to Glaser and his
kindred spirits, Sommerfeld’s theory was all wrong and justified neither relativity nor
quantum theory.26
In Sommerfeld’s theory, α was introduced merely as a spectroscopic quantity, a use-
ful combination of natural constants. Yet, to Sommerfeld it had a wider significance;
it symbolized some deep and as yet mysterious connection between electromagnetism
(e), relativity (c), and quantum theory (h) and therefore pointed towards a future theory
of quantum electrodynamics. In his early works on the subject, Sommerfeld did not
consider the inverse fine-structure constant and neither did he address the question of
how to explain the constant’s numerical value. This question would become of focal
interest only in the late 1920s, and then with Sommerfeld as a sympathetic if not un-
critical listener. In his approach to quantum theory, integers played an important role,
and he was in general fascinated by the physical significance of whole numbers. This
was clearly expressed in the preface to the first edition of Atombau, where in lyrical
tunes he alluded to a Pythagorean or Keplerian tradition for the search of harmonies in
the cosmos. “What we are nowadays hearing in the language of spectra,” Sommerfeld
wrote,
is a true music of the spheres within the atom, chords of integral relationships, an order and
harmony that becomes ever more perfect in spite of the manifold variety. . .. All integral
laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It
is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according
to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.27
These words made a great impression on young Wolfgang Pauli, one of Sommer-
feld’s most brilliant students, who later in life would often return to them. In a tribute
to his former teacher, Pauli wrote about Sommerfeld’s fine-structure constant: “The
25
Kragh, “The fine structure of hydrogen” (ref. 20).
26
L. Glaser, “Die Sommerfeldsche Feinstrukturkonstante als prinzipielle Frage der Physik,”
Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft 5 (1939), 289–331. Sommerfeld ignored Glaser’s
paper in his 1940 review of the fine structure theory. A. Sommerfeld, “Zur Feinstruktur der Was-
serstofflinien. Geschichte und gegenwärtiger Stand der Theorie,” Die Naturwissenschaften 28
(1940), 417–423.
27
A. Sommerfeld, Atombau und Spektrallinien (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1919).
406 H. Kragh
theoretical interpretation of its numerical value is one of the most important unsolved
problems of atomic physics.”28
Until the late 1920s, the fine-structure constant was considered a spectroscopic quan-
tity and was rarely considered in a non-spectroscopic context (but recall Lunn’s paper
of 1922). One of the few exceptions was a paper that Erwin Schrödinger wrote in 1922
in which he attempted to link the motion of electrons in atoms with Hermann Weyl’s
general-relativistic world geometry.29 In this attempt, Schrödinger introduced a univer-
sal constant γ with the dimension of an action and concluded by briefly discussing the
value of γ . Was it perhaps given by h/2πi? Or rather by e2 /c, as given by hα/2π
? Schrödinger seems to have preferred the first possibility and left the matter with the
comment that, “I am convinced that they [h and e2 /c] are not independent of each other.”
Inspired by Arthur Eddington’s extension of the general theory of relativity to cover
also electromagnetism, in 1925 the Liverpool physicist James Rice suggested a possible
connection between the fine-structure constant and cosmic units. He first suggested
hc 8π 3 Rρ
(2πα −1 ) = =
e 2 3r 2
where r is the electromagnetic radius of the electron, R the curvature radius of the closed
Einstein universe, and ρ the so-called gravitational radius of the electron. In Eddington’s
theory, the latter quantity was given by ρ = κm, where κ is Einstein’s constant of gravi-
tation, κ = 8π G/c2 . “Several interesting guesses at the nature of the pure number hc/e2
have been offered,” Rice noted, adding his own: “In some unknown way the important
pure number hc/e2 may be contained in the metrical relations of the structure of the
world.”30 However, he soon discovered that he had made a serious blunder and that his
relation was therefore “quite valueless.”31 All the same, Rice kept to his micro-macro
numerology and now suggested on a supposedly better basis that
hc r2
=
e2 6Rρ
Adopting R = 1.06 · 1026 cm as the radius of the universe, he found a satisfactory nu-
merical agreement. The right side of the equation gives 834, corresponding to α −1 =
133. Rice’s work linked for the first time the fine-structure constant to cosmic quantities,
such as Eddington would do in much greater detail a few years later.
28
W. Pauli, “Sommerfeld’s Beiträge zur Quantentheorie,” Die Naturwissenschaften 35 (1948),
129–132, on 131. English translation in C. P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn, eds., Wolfgang Pauli.
Writings on Physics and Philosophy (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994), pp. 59–68.
29
E. Schrödinger, “Über eine bemerkenswerte Eigenschaft der Quantenbahnen eines einzelnen
Elektrons,” Zeitschrift für Physik 12 (1922), 13–23. The paper, which included ideas that foreshad-
owed wave mechanics, is analysed in V. V. Raman and Paul Forman, “Why was it Schrödinger who
developed de Broglie’s ideas?” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 1 (1969), 291–314.
30
J. Rice, “On Eddington’s natural unit of the field and possible relations between it and the
universal constants of physics,” Philosophical Magazine 49 (1925), 457–463, on 463. A. S. Edd-
ington, The Mathematical Theory of Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923).
31
J. Rice, “On Eddington’s natural unit of the field,” Philosophical Magazine 49 (1925),
1056–1057.
4. From quantum mechanics to Eddington
The hydrogen spectrum played an important role in the discovery and early devel-
opment of both matrix and wave mechanics. Physicists realized that the new mechanics
ought to reproduce Sommerfeld’s fine-structure formula, and it was generally agreed
that for this purpose the theory had to be formulated relativistically. During the spring of
1926, this was done in two different ways.32 Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan add-
ed spin and relativity as first-order corrections to the Hamiltonian and succeeded in this
way to reproduce the approximate fine-structure formula (2). Even before Schrödinger’s
first paper on wave mechanics, he had derived a relativistic wave equation and applied
it to the hydrogen atom. However, he did not publish this equation, mainly because he
realized that although it resulted in a fine structure, it did not give the correct value.
To be precise, Schrödinger found a doublet separation ν ∗ too large by a factor 8/3.
He consequently lost confidence in the relativistic equation – generally known as the
Klein-Gordon equation – which was however rederived and discussed by several other
physicists later in 1926.33
Although hydrogen’s problematic fine structure was much discussed in the early
years of quantum mechanics, Sommerfeld’s constant was not assigned any particular
importance. Rather than using the constant directly, often it was used only indirectly, for
example hidden in Rydberg’s constant (R = α 2 mc2 /2h). Thus, in Heisenberg and Jor-
dan’s 1926 version of equation (2), the fine-structure constant did not appear.34 Rather
than stating the constant in the correction term as Rhcα 2 , they wrote it as 2R 2 h2 /mc2 .
A review of the literature indicates that until 1928, Sommerfeld’s constant was not seen
as more significant or fundamental than other composite constants of physics, such as
Rydberg’s or Compton’s.
This was to change with Paul A. M. Dirac’s linear relativistic wave equation of 1928,
which not only resulted in the exact fine-structure formula (1) but also gave the right
value of the electron’s magnetic moment and thus explained spin in terms of relativity
and quantum mechanics. Dirac did not explicitly mention the fine-structure constant
in his pioneering paper of January 1928, but it nonetheless triggered a development
that soon turned the constant into something of a celebrity. Sommerfeld was among
the many who found Dirac’s theory fascinating, and he quickly incorporated it into his
Wellenmechanischer Ergänzungsband, a work that appeared in 1929 and was one of
the first textbooks in quantum mechanics. He noticed with satisfaction that although in
its physical foundation Dirac’s theory was entirely different from the old orbit theory,
relativity played no less a role in Dirac’s explanation of fine structure than it did in his
32
The complex story is told in H. Kragh, “Erwin Schrödinger and the wave equation: The
crucial phase,” Centaurus 26 (1982), 154–197, Kragh, “The fine structure of hydrogen” (ref. 20),
and in Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory,
6 vols. (New York: Springer, 1982–2000), esp. vol. 5. Full references to the literature can be found
in these works.
33
See H. Kragh, “Equation with the many fathers. The Klein-Gordon equation in 1926,” Amer-
ican Journal of Physics 52 (1984), 1024–1033.
34
W. Heisenberg and P. Jordan, “Anwendung der Quantenmechanik auf das Problem der ano-
malen Zeemaneffekte,” Zeitschrift für Physik 37 (1926), 263–277.
408 H. Kragh
own theory. In fact, it played an even more significant role. In 1940, looking back on
the development, he wrote about Dirac’s theory that it
is fully based on the special theory of relativity,. . . and not merely on the particular law of
relativistic mass variation as in the older orbit theory of the electron. . .. Spin and relativity
separation then imply no contradiction. Our confidence in the fine structure formula has
in any case been strengthened since it was derived from the Dirac equation.35
Sommerfeld, the “great-grandfather” of the fine structure theory, had reason to be

proud of his formula, which “has proved an enormous vitality,” as he wrote in 1942.36
5. Toward quantum electrodynamics
Dirac’s theory of the electron became the basis for the first serious attempt to establish
a relativistic quantum field theory, published by Heisenberg and Pauli in 1929–30. The
Heisenberg-Pauli theory, however, was infected with divergencies, such as an infinite
self-energy of the electron, and it therefore gave rise to a major search among theorists
to remedy its faults and find a consistent and physically meaningful theory of quantum
electrodynamics.37 Here I only want to add a few remarks concerning the pivotal role
that the fine-structure constant played in parts of this long and difficult process.
Bohr had no inclination for numerology, but he recognized the significance of the
fine-structure constant and its role in establishing a relativistic quantum theory of mat-
ter and radiation. In December 1929, after having been informed about Dirac’s still
unpublished hole theory, he wrote to Dirac:
On the whole it appears that the circumstance that hc/e2 is large compared with unity
does not only indicate the actual limit of the applicability of the quantum theory in its
present form, but at the same time ensures its consistency within these limits. In fact the
radius of the electron estimated on classical theory is e2 /mc2 = (h/mc)(e2 / hc), and we
can therefore never determine the position of an electron within an accuracy comparable
35
A. Sommerfeld “Zur Feinstruktur der Wasserstofflinien” (ref. 26), p. 420.
36
A. Sommerfeld, “Zwansig Jahre spektroskopischer Theorie in München,” Scientia (1942),
123–129, on 129. Willis Lamb, the discoverer of the Lamb effect, received about 1950 a note
from Sommerfeld in which he presented himself as the “81-year-old greatgrandfather” of the fine
structure theory. See W. E. Lamb, “The fine structure of hydrogen,” in Laurie M. Brown and Lillian
Hoddeson, eds., The Birth of Particle Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
pp. 311–328, on 326.
37
The history of early quantum electrodynamics is fully described and documented in Seiya
Aramaki, “Formation of the renormalization theory in quantum electrodynamics,” Historia Sci-
entiarum 32 (1987), 1–42, and Sylvan S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
with ro without allowing an uncertainty in its momentum larger than mc, thus entailing
an uncertainty with energy surpassing the critical value mc2 .38
Bohr elaborated his view in his 1930 Faraday lecture in which he stated that it was only
due to the smallness of α that the difficulties of relativistic quantum mechanics could be
avoided in atomic theory. He was aware that the dimensionless constants α and M/m
had been objects of “much interesting speculation,” but he did not believe that there was
any connection between the two constants:
Although we must expect that the determination of these constants will be an integral part
of a general consistent theory in which the existence of the elementary electric particles
and the existence of the quantum of action are both naturally incorporated, these problems
would appear to be out of reach of the present formulation of quantum theory in which
the complete independence of these two fundamental aspects of atomicity is an essential
assumption.39
In accordance with Bohr’s view, the fine-structure constant was generally taken to be
just an experimentally determined quantity, a small parameter to be used in calculations,
and not something to be explained. However, for a period it was widely believed that the
correct theory of the future could be obtained only when α had been fully understood,
that it, its numerical value derived theoretically. The two problems were thought to be
different sides of the same coin, and consequently they had to be solved together. It
seems that this philosophy was adopted in particular by Heisenberg and Pauli, who in
the mid-1930s were almost obsessed with what they considered to be the fine structure
problem. In their correspondence of the period, α is all over.
For example, Pauli to Heisenberg: “I believe that the common reason for the un-
certainties of nuclear physics and for the abominations of subtraction physics is to be
found in the fixation of e2 /h̄c, and that surmounting both evils will not be possible with
a formalism that leaves e2 /h̄c undetermined.”40 Heisenberg agreed: “It is unlikely that
a reasonable formulation of quantum electrodynamics is possible without determina-
tion of e2 /h̄c,” he wrote to Pauli.41 They discussed the α-QED philosophy not only
in private, but also in papers and seminars. In 1934, in a paper on the consequences
of Dirac’s hole theory for quantum electrodynamics, Heisenberg concluded that “. . .
a contradiction-free union of the conditions of quantum theory with the corresponding
predictions of field theory is only possible in a [theory] that provides a particular value for
38
Bohr to Dirac, 5 December 1929, in Donald F. Moyer, “Evaluations of Dirac’s electron,
1928–1932,” American Journal of Physics 49 (1981), 1055–1062, p. 1058. Two days later, Bohr
told Kramers: “I have not given up my old conviction that it is the smallness of the ratio e2 / hc
which will get us out of the mess.” In Jørgen Kalckar, ed., Niels Bohr. Collected Works, vol. 6
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985), p. 428.
39
N. Bohr, “Chemistry and the quantum theory of atomic constitution,” Journal of the Chem-
ical Society (London) 1932, 349–384, on 378.
40
Pauli to Heisenberg, 1 November 1934, in Karl von Meyenn, ed., Wolfgang Pauli. Wissen-
schaftlicher Briefwechsel, vol. 2 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985), p. 358.
41
Heisenberg to Pauli, 25 April 1935, in Meyenn, Wolfgang Pauli (ref. 40), p. 386.
410 H. Kragh
Sommerfeld’s constant e2 /h̄c.”42 Quite similarly, in a lecture course at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935–36, Pauli said: “I believe that the development of
the theory along the correct lines will then lead to a numerical value of the fine-structure
constant α = e2 /h̄c = 1/137, and to an explanation of the fact that arbitrarily high masses
do not appear concentrated in a given space region in nature.”43 Finally, in his Nobel
Lecture delivered in Stockholm on 13 December 1946, Pauli expressed his dissatisfac-
tion with the current state of quantum field theory. He ended his lecture by stating that the
goal should be to establish a theory “which will determine the value of the fine-structure
constant and will thus explain the atomistic structure of electricity, which is such an
essential quality of all atomic sources of electric fields actually occurring in nature.”44
A few years later, when a renormalisable quantum electrodynamics was constructed
by Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and others, it turned out that the Heisenberg-Pauli worries
were unwarranted. In the new and highly successful theory, the fine-structure constant
was as unexplained as in earlier theories. And yet the theory worked wonderfully.
The route toward quantum electrodynamics included experiments as well as theory.
During the 1930s, there was considerable confusion regarding hydrogen’s fine structure
and its relation to the Dirac theory. American experimenters measured ν for hydro-
gen and compared it with the theoretical predictions. Since the ideal doublet separation
according to theory was given by ν ∗ = Rα 2 /16 = mc2 α 2 /4π h̄, experiments amount-
ed to a determination of α as well, although one that was admittedly less precise than
indirect measurements based on the Rydberg constant. Some of the fine structure ex-
periments agreed with theory, hence with the accepted value of α, but others resulted in
discordant values.
Frank Spedding and his collaborators at Caltech found α −1 = 137.04 ± 0.02, in
excellent agreement with Birge’s value.45 However, in 1934 Robley Williams and Ros-
well Gibbs46 obtained fine structure data that corresponded to α −1 = 141.7, and William
Houston and Y. Hsieh reported α −1 = 139.9. They thought their results indicated that
theory was not quite adequate, not that the value of the fine-structure constant was in
need of revision. “It seems impossible,” wrote Houston and Hsieh, “that there should be
any such error in the constants composing α , and we are forced to the conclusion that the
theory, as we have used it, is inadequate to explain the observations.”47 They were right,
42
W. Heisenberg, “Bemerkung zur Diracschen Theorie des Positrons,” Zeitschrift für Physik
90 (1934), 209–231, p. 231.
43
Quoted in Schweber, QED (ref. 37), p. 85.
44
W. Pauli, “Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics,” pp. 165–181, in Enz and Meyenn,
Wolfgang Pauli (ref. 28), on 181.
45
F. Spedding, C. D. Shane, and Norman S. Grace, “The fine structure of Hα ,” Physical Review
47 (1935), 38–44. For Birge, see below.
46
R. Williams and R. C. Gibbs, “Fine-structure analysis of H1α and H2α ,” Physical Review 45
(1934), 475–479.
47
W. Houston and Y. M. Hsieh, “The fine structure of the Balmer lines,” Physical Review
45 (1934), 263–272, p. 271. On the relationship between theory and fine structure experiments
in the 1930s, see Margaret Morrison, “More on the relationship between technically good and
conceptually important experiments: A case study,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
37 (1986), 101–122.
but in the 1930s the experimental situation was too muddled, and the authority of the
Dirac theory too great, to see it clearly. Sommerfeld followed the situation attentively.
In a detailed analysis of 1942, the now 73-year-old physicist discussed various effects
that might account for the apparent discrepancies, such as a modification of the nuclear
Coulomb field. But he concluded that this would not do: “The fine structure anomalies
that follow from the American observations are incompatible with Dirac’s theory of the
electron.”48
Sommerfeld’s conclusion was fully justified only after the war, when the Lamb shift
was discovered. This important discovery was instrumental in the development of the
new QED, and it also led to a new and more precise way to determine the fine-structure
constant spectroscopically. In the early 1950s, the frequency separation between the
deuterium states 2P3/2 and 2P1/2 was given as

cRD α 2 5α 2 m α 5.946α 2
ν = 1+ + 1− −
16 8 MD π π2
where MD is the mass of the deuteron and the two last terms are radiative corrections.
Measurement of ν led to the experimental value α −1 = 137.0371 ± 0.0012, in good
agreement with results based on more indirect methods.49
Notice that none of the dozen or more experimental papers on fine structure that
appeared in the 1930s referred to the possibility that α −1 might be 137 exactly, such as
claimed by Eddington. The Eddington approach to α, which I shall now look at, was
completely foreign to the world that the spectroscopists inhabitated.
6. A number derived a priori
The upsurge in interest in the fine-structure constant around 1930 was based on
Dirac’s theory, but it was due to an astronomer, Arthur Stanley Eddington. It was only
with Eddington’s work that α appeared as something more than a spectroscopic constant.
Moreover, Eddington was the first to focus on α −1 rather than α and to suggest that it
might be an integer; and he was the first to insist that the constant should be (and in fact
could be) derivable from fundamental theory. Although his theory proved to be a grand
failure, for a decade or more it attracted wide attention and gave a new meaning to the
fine-structure constant.
Inspired by private communications with the Edinburgh physicist Charles Galton
Darwin, Eddington eagerly took up Dirac’s theory, which he elevated to a status of uni-
versal significance. It became the beginning of a long and lonesome research program
that culminated in two enigmatic monographs, Relativity Theory of Protons and Elec-
trons of 1936 and the posthumously published Fundamental Theory of 1946. We shall
not be concerned here with Eddington’s ambitious program in general but merely focus
48
Sommerfeld, “Zur Feinstruktur der Wasserstofflinien” (ref. 26), p. 305.
49
See, e.g., Hans A. Bethe and Edwin E. Salpeter, Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Elec-
tron Atoms (New York: Plenum, 1977), p. 105 (first published 1957).
412 H. Kragh
on his unorthodox conception of the fine-structure constant.50 (Confusingly, Eddington

always referred to α −1 = hc/2πe2 rather than α as the fine-structure constant.) This
however was only a minor part of a much larger project that included as a crucial as-
sumption that atomic and cosmic constants necessarily must be related. “I take the view
that the mass of an electron is an interchange energy with all the other charges in the
universe averaged,”51 he wrote in 1931, thereby justifying his view of the Dirac equation
as describing the structural relation to the entire universe. For example, in the case of a
static (and closed) Einstein universe, he found that
√
2πmcα N
=
h P
where P is the radius of the universe and N the number of electrons in it.
In a sequel of papers between 1929 and 1932, Eddington developed a theory of the
fine-structure constant that he claimed could be deduced a priori. His starting point was
the Dirac equation, which he reformulated in a form where the fine-structure constant
appeared as a coefficient. For an electron in an electrostatic field (φ = −e2 /r) he wrote
it as
∂ψ ic
−α = ψ + c α2 − γ 2 ψ
∂t r
with γ = 2mcα/ h. He argued that the inverse α constant expressed a certain number
of algebraic degrees of freedom and therefore had to be an integer. Eddington’s number
did not specifically relate to electrons but had a much wider significance. It “expresses
a kind of property attributed to every pair of points in space; it turns space from a math-
ematical conception into a possible site of physical phenomena.”52 In his initial paper
of 1929, Eddington cited Robert A. Millikan’s value of 137.1 as the best experimental
determination, but his theory gave him α −1 = 16 + 21 16(16 − 1) = 136. Raymond T.
Birge, a specialist in precision experiments, immediately pointed out the inconsistency
between experiments and the predicted number 136.53 At first the discrepancy did not
worry Eddington very much: “I cannot persuade myself that the fault lies with the the-
ory,” he declared in his 1929 paper. Yet, although Eddington stressed the a priori nature
of his theory, of course he was not unconcerned with how his predictions agreed with
experiments. Shortly thereafter, possibly under the impact of Birge’s objection, he did
50
Eddington’s theory is analysed in Jacques Merleau-Ponty, Philosophie et Theorie Physique
chez Eddington (Paris: Besancon, 1965), and Clive W. Kilmister, Eddington’s Search for a Funda-
mental Theory. A Key to the Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also
David S. Evans, The Eddington Enigma (Princeton: Xlibris, 1998).
51
A. S. Eddington, “On the value of the cosmical constant,” Proceedings of the Royal Society
A 133 (1931), 605–615, p. 606.
52
A. S. Eddington, “The charge of an electron,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 122 (1929),
358–369, p. 365.
53
R. T. Birge, “The electronic charge e,” Nature 123 (1929), 318, and in more details in Birge,
“Probable values of the general physical constants,” Reviews of Modern Physics 1 (1929), 1–73.
Birge first objected to Eddington’s value in a private letter; see Birge “A survey of the systematic
evaluation of the universal physical constants,” Nuovo Cimento (Supplement) 6 (1957), 39–67,
on 60.
persuade himself that he had made a mistake and in his revised theory he came up with
α −1 = 137, still a whole number.54 The revised number appeared as 136 + 1, with 136
being the number of (generalized) degrees of freedom of a pair of electrons. Eddington
justified the extra number by means of the exclusion principle, namely as arising from
the indistinguishability of the two particles.
For the rest of his life, Eddington stuck to the integer 137 which he claimed to have
“obtained by pure deduction, employing only hypotheses already accepted as fundamen-
tal in wave mechanics.”55 In his subsequent works he deduced the number in somewhat
different ways, but we need not be concerned with these. As late as 1944, in his very
last publication, he quoted the experimental value α −1 = 137. 009 and concluded that
the small discrepancy was a problem for the experiment rather than the theory.56 In any
case, most contemporary physicists found his arguments obscure, and his results were
considered more important than the ways in which he derived them. Eddington’s reason-
ing was based on a peculiar mixture of mathematics and epistemology that made (and
makes) it difficult to understand his theory. As to empirical considerations, they played
almost no role. “It should be possible to judge whether the mathematical treatment and
solutions are correct, without turning up the answer in the book of nature,” he wrote.57
Another of Eddington’s important dimensionless constants was the proton-electron
mass ratio M/m, which he believed was intimately related to the inverse fine structure
number, although in this case to 136 rather than 137. The connection was through the
roots of a quadratic equation
10x 2 − 136xm + m2 = 0
Here, m is what Eddington called a “standard mass”, the mass of an unspecified neutral
particle. The mass ratio comes out as the ratio between the two roots, M/m = 1847.6, a
value that did not agree particularly well with the experimental mass ratio determined
at the time (which was 1834.1).
Eddington’s suggestion of a relationship between α and M/m was not the first of
its kind. We have seen how numerological predictions appeared as early as 1915 and
1922, in the works by Allen and Lunn. Apparently without knowing of these works, and
also without any relation to Dirac’s new theory, in 1928 a German by the name of Josef
Perles brought new attention to the pure number hc/e2 = 861.5, that is, the same rela-
tionship that Einstein had considered nearly twenty years earlier.58 According to Perles,
54
A. S. Eddington, “The interaction of electric charges,” Proceedings of the Royal Society
A 126 (1930), 696–728. Eddington, “The theory of electric charge,” Proceedings of the Royal
Society A 138 (1932), 17–41.
55
Eddington, “The theory of electric charge” (ref. 54), p. 41.
56
A. S. Eddington, “The evolution of the cosmical number,” Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society 40 (1944), 37–56. Eddington, Fundamental Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1946), p. 65. In fact, the experimental value was 137.030, but Eddington gave
theoretical reasons that it should be corrected to 137.009 (see below).
57
A. S. Eddington, Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1936), p. 3.
58
J. Perles, “Besteht zwischen der elektrischen Elementarladung e und dem Planckshen Wir-
kungsquantum h eine universelle Beziehung?” Die Naturwissenschaften 16 (1928), 1094–1095.
414 H. Kragh
the number could be expressed by other constants of nature, namely M/m, which he
took to be 1845.9. He suggested the relationship
h = (M/m)(e2 /c)(π − 1)−1
or, expressed in terms of the fine-structure constant,
α = 2π(π − 1)(m/M)
Perles did not refer explicitly to α, and he was uncertain whether his suggestion was
significant theoretically or merely a numerological coincidence.
Eddington’s paper of January 1929 caused quite a stir in the public press, and shortly
after its appearance it received a more than sceptical editorial in Nature: “Prof. Edd-
ington’s tentative speculations suggest a value of 136 for this ratio [hc/2π e2 ]; all the
existing experimental evidence, provided that our theoretical formulae are trustworthy,
are in favour of a value very near to 137.”59 As mentioned, Birge was quick to con-
trast Eddington’s 136 value with experimental data. He concluded that the best value
of the fine-structure constant was α = (7.283 ± 0.006) · 10−3 , corresponding to α −1 =
137.29 ± 0.11, and that Eddington was therefore wrong.60 Yet, inititially the situation
was not unambiguously against Eddington. Erik Bäcklund, a Swedish experimentalist,
felt provoked by the editorial in Nature to report new measurements from which he
concluded that “from the experimental evidence we can scarcely decide whether 136
or 137 is the better value for Eddington’s ratio.”61 For a few months the uncertainty
remained, but by the end of the year there was consensus that 136 could be ruled out
and that Eddington’s theory had a serious problem.
With Eddington’s revision to 137 the situation changed, and it again became possible
for experimentalists to support the theoretical value, such as did W. N. Bond, a physicist
at the University of Reading. Bond disagreed with Birge, and his data analysis led him
to conclude that Eddington’s value of 137 was exactly true. In 1930, he found α −1 =
136.94 ± 0.15, in agreement with Eddington’s prediction.62 Birge countered by criti-
cizing Bond’s methods and in 1932 reported a best value of α −1 = 137.305 ± 0.0048,
which implied a rejection of the Eddington-Bond proposal.
This was not a final experimental defeat, however, for in 1934 Bond suggested
that somehow all the measurements of e/m had systematically missed a factor of β =
136/137; what experimentalists determined was not the true value of e/m, he claimed,
but β e/m.63 By including the missing factor, corresponding to a change of 0.735%, he
59
Nature 123 (2 February 1929), on 174.
60
Birge, “Probable values of the general physical constants” (ref. 53).
61
E. Bäcklund, “Eddington’s hypothesis and the electronic charge,” Nature 123 (1929),
409–410.
62
W. N. Bond, “The values and inter-relationships of c, e, h, M, m, G and R,” Philosophical
Magazine 10 (1930), 994–1003. See also Bond, “The electric charge,”Philosophical Magazine 12
(1931), 632–640, and Bond, “Relationship of universal physical constants,” Proceedings of the
Physical Society (London) 44 (1932), 374–381.
63
W. N. Bond, “Value of e/m,” Nature 133 (1934), 327. Bond, “The ratio 136/137 in atomic
physics,” Nature 135 (1935), 825.
found promising agreement with Eddington’s values of both α and M/m. Bond did not
offer a theoretical justification for his correction factor except that he vaguely suggested
that it might be a quantum-interaction effect; perhaps, he speculated, it might be due to
the faulty assumption that a physical system can be analyzed simply as consisting of
its parts. Eddington happily accepted Bond’s hypothesis and rushed to supply it with a
theoretical justification on the basis of his earlier 136-to-137 revision.64 Yet, although
the Bond correction resulted in much better agreement between theory and experimental
data, to the majority of physicists it appeared coincidental and Eddington’s explanation
conspicuously post hoc. For example, in Eddington’s theory the β = 136/137 factor
might occur raised to any power β n , and his arguments that it entered precisely as β 1
remained obscure and unpersuasive.65
At any rate, subsequent experimental determinations did not support Eddington’s
value, and by the 1940s it took more than good will to argue experimentally that α −1
was precisely 137 (see Table 1). The number 137 might still be theoretically significant,
but it could hardly be the inverse fine-structure constant. In 1941 Birge determined the
fine-structure constant on the basis of
α = 4πR∞ F (e/m)/NA
where R∞ is Rydberg’s constant for infinite nuclear mass, F is Faraday’s constant and
NA Avogadro’s constant.66 He reported the value α = (7.2976 ± 0.0008) · 10−3 or α −1
= 137.030 ± 0.016. However, Eddington argued that a straightforward comparison with
this value was misleading because it relied on accepted physical theory; such a com-
parison “would not be an observational test of my theory, but a comparison partly with
observation and partly with the theory which it condemns.” He suggested that small cor-
rections had to be applied and found in this way the “observed” values α −1 = 137.009
and M/m = 1837.40, from which he concluded that “the agreement of observation and
theory is complete.”67 However, the value 137.009 was not accepted by other physicists
who maintained that the true value of α −1 was close to 137.03.68
Birge later complained that Eddington’s attempts to rescue his value were factu-
ally incorrect and based on an incomplete understanding of the statistical theory of
64
A. S. Eddington, “The factor 137/136 in quantum theory,” Nature 133 (1934), 907. Edding-
ton, Relativity Theory (note 57), pp. 303–305.
65
Kilmister, Eddington’s Search (ref. 50), pp. 199–200.
66
R. T. Birge, “The general physical constants,” Reports of Progress in Physics 8 (1941),
90–134.
67
A. S. Eddington, “The theoretical values of the physical constants,” Proceedings of the
Physical Society (London) 54 (1942), 491–504, on 491–492.
68
Edmund Whittaker, a sympathetic critic of Eddington’s theory, claimed in 1949 that the
smaller value of the inverse fine-structure constant “has led to a general belief that Eddington’s
assertion was right.” E. Whittaker, From Euclid to Eddington. A Study of the External World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), p. 203. However, even a cursory study of the
physics literature at the time reveals that there was no such belief either among experimentalists
or theorists.
416 H. Kragh
Table 1. Determinations of the inverse fine-structure constant, 1929–1957. Abbreviations: PR =

Physical Review, ZP = Zeitschrift für Physik, RMP = Reviews of Modern Physics
author year value source
R. Birge 1929 137.29 ± 0.11 ref. 53

W. Bond 1930 136.94 ± 0.15 ref. 62
R. Birge 1932 137.305 ± 0.005 PR 40, 228
F. Spedding et al. 1935 137.04 ± 0.02 ref. 45
R. Birge 1941 137.030 ± 0.016 ref. 66
U. Stille 1943 137.033 ± 0.092 ZP 121, 133
J. DuMond & E. Cohen 1949 137.027 ± 0.007 RMP 21, 651
H. Bethe & C. Longmire 1949 137.041 ± 0.005 PR 75, 306
J. Bearden & J. Thomsen 1957 137.0371 ± 0.0005 ref. 69
measurement. “It is now quite evident that 1/α is not exactly 137,” he wrote in 1957,
adding that, “I am not a Numerologist.”69
7. Responses to Eddington’s theory
Eddington’s grand attempt to derive theoretically the value of the fine-structure con-
stant and other constants of nature was met with general disbelief among the leading
quantum physicists.70 In a letter to Oskar Klein, Pauli offered his opinion with usual
candour: “I now regard Eddington’s ‘136-work’ as complete nonsense; more precisely,
as romantic poetry, not as physics.”71 Yet, although very few accepted the theory, not all
of Pauli’s colleagues shared his contempt. Sommerfeld was certainly not one of Pauli’s
romantic poet-physicists, but he felt Eddington’s program to be attractive to some ex-
tent and in resonance with his own way of thinking. As Planck noted in 1938, much of
Sommerfeld’s physics was rooted in “aesthetic grounds” and inspired by a Pythagorean
“attraction by the secret harmonies and completeness of the pictures that are revealed
to the researcher’s groping imagination.”72 In a paper of 1929, Sommerfeld dealt sym-
pathetically if not uncritically with Eddington’s new theory and pointed out that α −1 =
136 was in close agreement with Arthur H. Compton’s result of 135.9.
Sommerfeld added another reason to take Eddington’s proposal seriously, namely
that it was “most beautiful and satisfactory.” If Eddington really was right in suggesting
that the elementary electric charge could be constructed out of h and c, it would be “the
greatest triumph” and open up “amazing perspectives in the unification of the physical
69
Birge, “A survey of the systematic evaluation” (ref. 53), p. 60. By that time, the recommend-
ed experimental value for the inverse constant was 137.0371 ± 0.0005. See J. A. Bearden and
J. S. Thomsen, “A survey of atomic constants,” Nuovo Cimento (Supplement) 5 (1957), 267–360.
70
For the reception of Eddington’s theory, see A. Viber Douglas, The Life of Arthur Stanley
Eddington (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1956), pp. 155–182.
71
Pauli to Klein, 18 February 1929, in A. Hermann et al., eds., Wolfgang Pauli. Wissenschaft-
licher Briefwechsel, vol. 1 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1979), p. 491.
72
M. Planck, “Arnold Sommerfeld zum siebzigsten Geburtstag,” Die Naturwissenschaften 26
(1938), 777–779, on 778.
world picture.”73 Sommerfeld continued to follow at a distance Eddington’s work, and

in 1937 he wrote to Einstein: “At present Eddington’s daring approach of counting seems
to me once again the most promising one because of its numerical results (not only the
fine-structure constant but also the proton’s magnetic moment and the proton-proton
interaction). But nobody understands this approach.”74 Again, three years later the now
72-year-old Munich physicist repeated his praise of the “beautiful” and “daring” the-
ory, and he found the near agreement of the fine-structure constant with Eddington’s
prediction to be remarkable. But Sommerfeld was not an Eddingtonian, and he fully
recognized the weaknesses in Eddington’s program; for example, in his paper of 1940
he pointed out that Eddington’s prediction of the proton’s magnetic moment disagreed
flatly with measurements.75
Most Continental quantum physicists had little respect for Eddington’s theory, and in
particular they rejected his unorthodox version of quantum mechanics. At a conference
in Warsaw in 1938, where Eddington lectured on his theory, he was met by a united
front including Bohr, Hendrik Kramers, Klein, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and
Louis de Broglie. According to Bohr, Eddington’s approach was “very different from
the usual quantum point of view,” and Kramers “had the impression that it concerned
another quantum theory.”76 As we have seen, Pauli and Heisenberg were greatly inter-
ested in the fine-structure constant and its role in the theory of quantum electrodynamics;
but they saw no reason why the constant should be an integer and completely ignored
Eddington’s approach. In 1935 Heisenberg told Bohr that, “Lately I have thought much
about e2 /h̄c . . . . If only for fun, . . . I write you the equation e2 /h̄c = π/24 33 that oc-
curred to me while I was playing with e2 /h̄c.”77 Pauli too thought about the meaning of
α, and on one occasion suggested that five-dimensional relativity theory might help to
understand the problem.78
Pascual Jordan had a much more positive view of Eddington’s theory, which served
as an inspiration for his own cosmo-numerological ideas that he started to develop in
1937. He suggested that Eddington’s recent book would become “a source of important
and fertile ideas for research in physics.” Jordan agreed with the British astronomer
that, “From a complete understanding of the laws of quanta and relativity it should be
73
A. Sommerfeld, “Über die Anfänge der Quantentheorie von mehreren Freiheitsgraden,” Die
Naturwissenschaften 17 (1929), 481–483.
74
Sommerfeld to Einstein, 30 December 1937, in A. Hermann, ed., Albert Einstein - Arnold
Sommerfeld. Briefwechsel (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1968), p. 118.
75
Eddington predicted the proton to have a magnetic moment of 5/2 nuclear magnetons
(h̄/2Mc), whereas by 1941 the observed value was 2,7896 ± 0.0008. In Fundamental Theory
(ref. 56, p. 249), Eddington found reasons to correct his theoretical value to 2.7899. By 1957, the
most probable experimental value was stated as 2.79276 ± 0.00002. See Bearden and Thomsen,
“A survey of atomic constants,” (ref. 69).
76
New Theories in Physics (Warsaw: International Institution of Intellectual Cooperation,
1939), p. 204 and p. 194.
77
Heisenberg to Bohr, 10 January 1935, in Meyenn, Wolfgang Pauli (ref. 40), p. 366. Heisen-
berg reported the same speculation to Pauli (ibid., p. 370). Probably unknown to Heisenberg, his
formula for α had been given by Lunn as early as 1922 (see section 2).
78
Pauli to Klein, 7 September 1935, in Meyenn, Wolfgang Pauli (ref. 40), p. 430.
418 H. Kragh
possible to deduce. . . that the fine-structure constant has just the value [it has],” but
stopped short of supporting Eddington’s claim that α −1 was 137 exactly.79 Even more
than Jordan, Schrödinger felt an intellectual affinity with Eddington, whose ideas he
shared for a period. He was “convinced that, for a long time to come, the most important
research in physical theory will follow closely the lines of thought inaugurated by Sir
Arthur Eddington.”80 However, he eventually came to the conclusion that Eddington’s
derivation of the natural constants “is beyond my understanding,”81 a view shared by
nearly all physicists. Schrödinger published several works related to or inspired by Edd-
ington’s theory, but in none was he concerned with the problem of the fine-structure
constant.
Although Dirac had no confidence in Eddington’s attempt at reconstructing physics,
he was influenced to some extent by Eddington’s aspirations and ideas, if more in a
methodological than a substantial sense. This appears most clearly in Dirac’s cosmo-
logical theory of 1937–38, which was based on dimensionless combinations of natural
constants, very much in the Eddington style except that Dirac was only concerned with
very large numbers (of the order of magnitude 1039 ) where the fine-structure constant
played no role. Referring to Eddington’s arguments, Dirac wrote in 1937 that he had “the
feeling that they are probably substantially correct in the case of the smaller numbers
[α −1 and M/m]” but not for the large numbers.82
Also Dirac’s important paper of 1931 – in which he introduced the magnetic mono-
pole and the idea of the positron – was indebted to Eddington’s methodology. Dirac’s
original concern was “with the reason for the existence of a smallest electric charge.
This smallest charge is known to exist experimentally and to have the value e given
approximately by hc/e2 = 137.”83 Notice the word “approximately,” which indicates
that Dirac did not accept Eddington’s integral value. Dirac did not succeed in deducing
either e or α, but found instead a reciprocal relation between electricity and magnetism,
namely that the strength g of a magnetic monopole is quantized in terms of
g = h̄c/2e = (h̄c/4α)1/2
Like many contemporary physicists, Dirac believed that ultimately α should be explain-
able by physical theory. As late as 1978, he wrote: “The problem of explaining this
79
P. Jordan, “Die physikalischen Weltkonstanten,” Die Naturwissenschaften 25 (1937),
513–517, on 517 and 513.
80
E. Schrödinger, “World structure,” Nature 140 (1937), 742–744, which was a review of
Eddington, Relativity Theory (ref. 57). On Schrödinger’s attempt to understand and develop Edd-
ington’s ideas, see Alexander Rueger, “Atomism from cosmology. Erwin Schrödinger’s work
on wave mechanics and space-time structure,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological
Sciences 18 (1988), 377–401.
81
E. Schrödinger, “The general theory of relativity and wave mechanics,” in Scientific Papers
Presented to Max Born (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1953) pp. 65–74, on 73. The paper was
written about 1940.
82
P. Dirac, “The cosmological constants,” Nature 139 (1937), 323.
83
P. Dirac, “Quantised singularities in the electromagnetic field,” Proceedings of the Royal
Society A 133 (1931), 60–72, on 62. See also the analysis in H. Kragh, Dirac. A Scientific Biog-
raphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 207–214. Dirac used at the time the
symbol h in the meaning h̄ = h/2π.
number [h̄c/e2 ] is still completely unsolved. . .. I think it is perhaps the most fundamen-
tal unsolved problem of physics at the present time, and I doubt very much whether any
really big progress will be made in understanding the fundamentals of physics until it
is solved.”84 At some time during the 1930s, he apparently played with the idea that
the fine–structure constant might be related to the temperature concept, such as indi-
cated by a letter from Heisenberg: “I don’t believe at all any more in your conjecture
that the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant may have something to do with the concept
of temperature; that is, neither do I any more believe in the Lewis value. Rather, I am
firmly convinced that one must determine e2 /h̄c within the hole theory itself, in order
that the theory may be formulated in a sensible way.”85 Heisenberg continued to report
his suggestion that e2 /h̄c = π/24 33 , as he had already done to Pauli and Bohr, making
sure that Dirac understood that his suggestion was “of course in play.”
8. Alpharology
From the late 1920s onward, a large number of articles appeared in the scientific
literature that attempted to explain theoretically the natural constants or establish re-
lationships between them. To “explain” a dimensionless constant typically meant to
derive its value from some theoretical basis or, in many cases, just give a numerical
formula that approximately matched the empirical value. A few of the works in this
tradition were serious attempts to understand theoretically why the constants have the
values they have, but most of the papers were numerological suggestions of little or no
scientific significance. The main reason for the upsurge in the literature about 1930 was
no doubt Eddington’s new theory that seemed to give numerology a certain measure
of respectability (although, it should be stressed, Eddington’s theory was not really nu-
merological). A large portion of the papers in the 1930s were concerned with relations
between cosmological and atomic constants, a tradition that Eddington started and was
carried on by Dirac, Jordan and a few other leading physicists. I shall briefly look at some
of the works that considered the fine-structure constant in the period between 1929 and
1950. The works of the Eddington epigones were of limited scientific significance, but
they represented a popular trend in the period and illustrate the continual appeal of what
may be called “alpharology,” the concern with the numerical value of the fine-structure
constant.86
A paper by Enos Witmer, an American physicist, may illustrate the purely spec-
ulative approach that was just guesswork with no foundation in theory. In 1929 he
suggested a relationship between the two ligthest elements, hydrogen and helium, and
the fine-structure constant, namely,
84
P. Dirac, “The monopole concept,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 17 (1978),
235–247, on 236.
85
Heisenberg to Dirac, 27 March 1935, in Kragh, Dirac (ref. 83), p. 209. Dirac presumably
referred to the Lewis-Adams theory of 1914 (ref. 15), where the temperature entered through
Stefan’s law.
86
Other examples are given in Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (ref.
12), pp. 223–243, 292–295. See also Barrow, “The lore of large numbers” (ref. 12).
420 H. Kragh
mHe /mH = (ZHe /ZH )2 (1 + α)−1 = 4(1 + α)−1
Insertion of atomic weights gave α = 0.00724 ± 0.00025, “in excellent agreement with
the spectroscopic value 0.00729.”87 Another American physicist, Vladimir Rojansky at
Union College, Schenectady, admitted inspiration from Eddington’s new theory from
which he proposed that M/m = 1362 /10.88 With Eddington’s identification α −1 = 136, it
amounts to
α = (m/10M)1/2 ,
which is nothing but a duplication of Allen’s result from 1915.
In Germany, Wilhelm Anderson at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia)
speculated that photons might be tightly bound dipoles of opposite elementary charg-
es.89 He found for the ratio between a photon’s mass and its “rest mass” the expression
mγ o /mγ = hc/4e2 . By adopting Eddington’s value of α, he got what he considered the
important formula mγ o /mγ = π/2α = 68π . Also in Germany, Reinhold Fürth used the
hypothesis of absolute quantum uncertainties to argue that the proton-to-electron mass
ratio µ = M/m could be found from
µ + µ−1 + 2 = (2kπ )/α,
where k referred to the charge distribution of a classical electron.90 With k = 32/15 and
neglecting the second term, the ratio becomes 1838.2. Or, in terms of the fine-structure
constant,
α −1 = (15/64π )(µ − 2)
Fürth further suggested91 that gravitation was connected to atomic constants through
the relationship
hc
= 1632
π(M + m)2 G
Similar reasoning was applied by Fürth’s colleagues at the German University in Prague,
Walter Glaser and Kurt Sitte, who furthermore used the idea of a minimum time interval
87
E. Witmer, “The relative masses of the proton, electron, and helium nucleus,” Nature 124
(1929), 180–181.
88
V. Rojansky, “The ratio of the mass of the proton to that of the electron,” Nature 123 (1929),
911–912.
89
W. Anderson, “Über die Struktur der Lichtquanten,” Zeitschrift für Physik 58 (1929),
841–857.
90
R. Fürth, “Über einen Zusammenhang zwischen quantenmechanischer Unschärfe und Struk-
tur der Elementarteilchen und seine hierauf begründete Berechnung der Massen von Proton und
Elektron,” Zeitschrift für Physik 57 (1929), 429–446. For the hypothesis of absolute uncertainties
and examples of how it was used in the 1930s, see H. Kragh and Bruno Carazza, “From time
atoms to space-time quantization: The idea of discrete time, ca 1925–1936,” Studies in the History
and Philosophy of Science 25 (1994), 437–462.
91
R. Fürth, “Versuch einer quantentheoretischen Berechnung der Massen von Proton und
Elektron,” Physikalische Zeitschrift 30 (1929), 895–899.
to calculate the maximum number of chemical elements.92√Their argument was basically √

that the velocity of a K-electron must be smaller than c/ 2, which implies Zcα < 2
or Z < 97. The kind of physics that Rojansky, Fürth and other Eddington epigones
engaged in had a strong element of numerology and was not taken seriously by most
mainstream physicists. To Hans Bethe, Guido Beck and Wolfgang Riezler it deserved a
humorous reply, which they gave in 1931. They pretended to derive from Eddington’s
theory the zero-point temperature as To = −(2/α − 1) degrees: “Putting To = −273◦ ,
we obtain for 1/α the value 137, in perfect agreement within the limits of accuracy with
the value obtained by totally independent methods.”93 Their spoof article was accepted
and appeared in Die Naturwissenschaften.94
Arthur Haas was yet another physicist who in several papers took up Eddington’s
ideas and developed them in his own way. He was particularly interested in the cosmolog-
ical consequences and the connection between cosmic and atomic constants. Among the
relationships he suggested between the fine-structure constant and the proton-electron
ratio µ were
√ √
15/17 2
α −1 = µ and α −1 = µ
4π 6π
With µ = 1838, the numbers come out close to the experimental value of the inverse fine-
structure constant.95 Other physicists believed that the essence of α was that it can be
written as a ratio between two fundamental length units, such as α = (e2 /mc2 )/(h̄/mc).
For example, this was the basis of Lancelot L. Whyte’s attempt to establish a new con-
ceptual framework for theoretical physics.96
The German-American physicist Alfred Landé, a respected theorist who had contrib-
uted importantly to the old quantum theory, was not a speculatively oriented physicist
of the same branch as Rojansky, Fürth, and Haas. Yet he was no less fascinated by the
fine structure problem. About 1940 he developed a new theory that, he claimed, led
92
W. Glaser and K. Sitte, “Elementäre Unschärfen, Grenze des periodischen Systems und
Massenverhältnis von Elektron und Proton,” Zeitschrift für Physik 87 (1934), 674–686. For other
attempts to determine the maximum number of chemical elements from atomic theory, see H.
Kragh and B. Carazza, “A historical note on the maximum atomic number of chemical elements,”
Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie 20 (1995), 207–215.
93
G. Beck, H. Bethe and W. Riezler, “Bemerkung zur Quantentheorie der Nullpunktstemper-
atur,” Die Naturwissenschaften 19 (1931), 39.
94
But prompted outrage from Arnold Berliner, editor of Die Naturwissenschaften, and Som-
merfeld’s insistence that Bethe apologize to him. See Max Delbrück, “Out of this world,” in
Frederick Reines, ed., Cosmology, Fusion and Other Matters: George Gamow Memorial Volume
(London: Adam Hilger, 1972) pp. 280–288.
95
The first relation is from A. E. Haas, “Zur Frage der physikalischen Weltkonstanten,” Die
Naturwissenschaften 25 (1937), 733–734, the second from Haas, “The dimensionless constants
of physics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 24 (1938), 274–276.
96
L. L. Whyte, “Fundamental physical theory,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1
(1950–51), 303–326, with references to earlier works. Also Boris Podolsky stressed the interpre-
tation of α as a ratio between length units: B. Podolsky, “An interpretation of e2 /mc2 and h/mc,”
Physical Review 46 (1934), 734–738.
422 H. Kragh
to interesting relationships between the fundamental constants. He found that the fine-
structure constant could be expressed as a ratio between two constants in his theory,
α = b/d. The quantity b he deduced a priori from his theory to be 0.02985037 and by
assuming d = (16 π /3)1/2 he arrived at α −1 = 137.1273, “in perfect agreement with the
best experimental evidence.”97
The discovery of the muon (or mesotron) in 1937 was followed by speculative at-
tempts to relate the new particle to the constants of nature. For example, Patrick Blackett
suggested that the decay of the muon might indicate a connection between gravitation
and weak interactions.98 He mentioned that the muon’s mean lifetime, found to be 2.5 ·
10−6 sec, might be related to the gravitational constant by
∼ αro√e
τo =
mµ c G
where mµ is the muon’s mass, at the time thought to be about 170 me . Also another
British physicist, Henry Flint at Kings College, London, focussed on the muon. Based
on arguments on five-dimensional relativity and the notion of a fundamental length, Flint
suggested that the mass of the muon might be related to the fine-structure constant by
mµ ∼= me /α.99 After World War II, when new elementary particles were discovered, a
few physicists sought to relate their masses to the magic number 137. In 1952, Yoichiro
Nambu conjectured that the masses of all elementary particles heavier than the electron
could be expressed by the formula
m = 1/2(n + 1)me α −1
where n is an integer.100 For example, n = 2 reproduced the muon mass (206 me ), and
n = 3 the mass of the pion (274 me ); the nucleons fitted roughly into the scheme by
n = 26 (1849 me ). Although Nambu admitted his suggestion was purely empirical and
“rather fanciful,” he believed it might reflect some significant regularity in the growing
number of elementary particles. Nambu’s conjecture that mµ = 3me /2α was adopted
by the Italian physicist P. Caldirola, who considered the muon to be an excited state of
the electron.101
Let me finally mention what is possibly the shortest communication in a respected
physics journal ever. Friedrich Lenz, a German, may have written his letter to Physical
Review with tongue in cheek. Here it is, quoted in extenso: “The most exact value at
present for the ratio of proton to electron mass is 1836.12 ± 0.005. It may be of interest
to note that this number coincides with 6π 5 = 1836.12.”102
97
A. Landé, “The ratio of e, c, and h,” Physical Review 58 (1940), 843.
98
P. M. S. Blackett, “Instability of the mesotron and the gravitational constant,” Nature 144
(1939), 30.
99
H. T. Flint, “The theory of the electric charge and the quantum theory,” Philosophical
Magazine 29 (1940), 330–343.
100
Y. Nambu, “An empirical mass spectrum of elementary particles,” Progress in Theoretical
Physics 7 (1952), 595–596.
101
P. Caldirola, “A new model of classical electron,” Nuovo Cimento 3, Supplement 2 (1956),
297–343.
102
F. Lenz, “The ratio of proton and electron masses,” Physical Review 82 (1951), 554.
These were some, but far from all alpharological examples of the period. The numer-
ological tradition continued after the war and is still alive if not considered respectable.
Before turning to Born’s very different interest in the matter, we offer two further ex-
amples from the second half of the century:103
√
α −1 = 3 2(π 3 + π) = 136.883
and
α −1 = 219/4 3−7/4 51/4 π 11/4 = 137.036
9. Max Born and the number 137
Born’s response to Eddington’s theory was decidedly hostile and from about 1935
he often attacked it, both privately and publicly, as an example of what he considered
to be excessive rationalism. Eddington’s and Edward A. Milne’s different versions of
cosmophysics were the prime targets in an address that Born gave in 1943 to the Durham
Philosophical Society and in which he defended physics as an inductive-empirical sci-
ence: “My advice to those who wish to learn the art of scientific prophecy is not to rely on
abstract reason, but to decipher the secret language of Nature from Nature’s documents,
the facts of experience.”104 In a letter to Einstein, he characterized the Milne-Edding-
ton approach as “rubbish” and added that, “something of that kind had to be written
as Eddington is regarded as a kind of prophet in this country.”105 As to Eddington’s
deduction of the value of the fine-structure constant, in his 1943 address Born ridiculed
it by suggesting that similar numbers could be extracted from the Bible. Calculations of
the numbers 137 and 1848 were really “coincidences . . . not true predictions.”
In spite of Born’s rhetoric, his attitude toward ambitious cosmophysical theories à
la Eddington was ambivalent and not totally dismissive. Born was not unreceptive to
Eddington’s aspirations, which had more than a little affinity with his own inclination
toward ambitious unitary theories. He was convinced that quantum mechanics and gen-
eral relativity must be unified, only did he not accept Eddington’s solution. In 1938,
in a comment on Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, he said that Eddington’s
“attempt to link the properties of the smallest particles to those of the whole universe
contradicts strongly my physical intuition.” He then added, significantly, “Therefore
I have considered the question whether there may exist other possibilities of unifying
quantum theory and the principle of general covariance, which seems to me the essential
thing.”106 Born hesitated to support any of the rival cosmological theories that emerged
103
The first equation appears in K. M. Guggenheimer, “Fundamental length, fine-structure con-
stant and cosmological number,” Nature 193 (1962), 664–665, the second is quoted in Barrow
and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (ref. 12), p. 231. See also Barrow, The Book of
Nothing (ref. 12), p. 231.
104
M. Born, Experiment and Theory in Physics (New York: Dover Books, 1956), p. 44.
105
Born to Einstein, 10 November 1944, in M. Born, ed., Albert Einstein, Max Born. Brief-
wechsel 1916–1955 (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1972), p. 160.
106
M. Born, “A suggestion for unifying quantum theory and relativity,” Proceedings of the
Royal Society (London) A 165 (1938), 291–303, on 291. In M. Born, Atomic Physics (New York:
424 H. Kragh
after World War II, but he was not unsympathetic to the steady-state theory with its
controversial claim of continuous creation of matter. He came to accept that “the future
theory of matter cannot by-pass the cosmological point of view.”107
What does this have to do with the fine-structure constant? Quite a lot, it turns out,
for in spite of his critique Born was involved in the same game as Eddington, to deduce
theoretically the meaning and value of the constant. In the late 1930s, he was busy with
developing his own unitary theory, which had its roots in the Born-Infeld field theory of
1934 based on a finite electron radius. During his stay in India, where he resided between
1935 and 1936, he gave a lecture in Bangalore in which he outlined how his new theory
promised to cast light on “the mysterious number 137.” The paper that resulted is not
well known, but it is of interest to our concern and therefore needs consideration.108
There are two mysterious numbers in physics, Born explained, α −1 = 137 and M/m =
1840, and “I believe that the problem of the number 1840 is closely connected with that of
the number 137.” Born emphasized repeatedly how the fine-structure constant governed
a wide range of physical phenomena and that the explanation of it therefore “must be the
central problem of natural philosophy.” He hoped to explain α by assuming h̄ (and c) as
a primary quantity and reduce e to it, which was very much Dirac’s program in his 1931
monopole theory. The methodological affinity to Dirac and Eddington is further illustrat-
ed by Born’s dislike of the appearance of (non-mathematical) numbers in fundamental
theory. “A perfect theory,” he wrote, “should be able to derive the number α by purely
mathematical reasoning without recourse to experience.” Eddington would have agreed
in the goal, but Born followed another route than Eddington whose theory he considered
to be “rather mystical.” In Born’s field theory, the electron’s “radius” was no longer
given by a = e2 /mc2 but by ro = 1.236 a, where the numerical coefficient was obtained
by calculation. He found the promised relation between M/m and α to be given by
M/m ∼ = α −2 /8 = 2340
Whereas the coefficient 1/8 was stated to be “rather arbitrary,” he stressed that “the ap-
pearance of the factor α −2 is quite unambiguous, and it is responsible for the order of
magnitude.”109 Born considered the positron and the proton to be merely two different
states of the same elementary charge, and similarly for the electron and the (still hypo-
thetical) antiproton. He therefore suspected that baryon-nonconserving processes such as
p+ → e+ + γ and p− → e− + γ
should be possible.110
Dover Books,1989), p. 169, first published in 1935, he called Eddington’s derivation of the fine-
structure constant “altogether too fantastic to be acceptable,” although he admitted that the constant
“indicates a deeper relation . . . the determination of its numerical value is a challenge to physics.”
107
M. Born, Physics in My Generation. A Selection of Papers (London: Pergamon Press, 1956),
p. 138. The paper was originally published in 1953.
108
Born, “The mysterious number” (ref. 13).
109
Ibid., p. 555. Born published the same result in his “Quantised field theory and the mass of
the proton,” Nature 136 (1935), 952–953, where he remarked that it was “in sufficient agreement
with the experimental value 1,840.” Expressed in terms of α, the result is α −1 = 121.
110
The principle of baryon conservation was still unknown, only to be formulated (as nucleon
conservation) by Ernst Stueckelberg in 1938. Born’s proposal, possibly the first speculation of
By combining elements from his own field theory and the more conventional Hei-
senberg-Pauli-Dirac quantum electrodynamics, he was further led to the relationship
90πe6 α = 8b2 (mc2 )4
where b = e/ro2 and mc2 = 1.236 e2 /ro . The charges and distances cancel and we are
left with
α −1 = 1.2364 (45π/4) = 82.4
which according to Born was “of the right order of magnitude” and a result that “seems
not to be discouraging.” Born’s theory had similarities with other attempts of alpharol-
ogy in the period, but of course it rested on an elaborate physical basis which, although
not quite orthodox, was much more conventional than Eddington’s.
Born carried his fascination with α over into the new version of unitary field theory
that he developed from 1938 to about 1950. It was based on what he called the principle
of reciprocity, which he took to be a generalization of the fact that in quantum mechanics
the laws are symmetrical in space-time (q-space) and momentum-energy (p-space); or,
that they are invariant under the transformations xk → pk and pk → −xk . According
to Born’s principle, q-space and p-space were subject to geometrical laws of the same
structure, namely, a Riemannian metric. The connection between the reciprocity princi-
ple and the fine-structure constant was first considered by Landé, who suggested that the
fine-structure constant would come out as a solution to a certain integral equation.111
Landé did find a value for α , but admitted that he did not really understand how he ob-
tained it. In a letter to Pauli, he wrote: “My eigenvalue theory has now resulted in a final
value for Sommerfeld’s α: 137.04. . . with so many further decimals as one wants. . ..
But I still don’t understand all the steps [in the derivation].”112
Born revised Landé’s approach in the hope of getting a definite expression for α
in terms of a parameter λ that appeared in his theory. He had to admit that so far
the theory was “to be considered only as a mathematically attractive suggestion,”113
and the program soon ran into severe mathematical difficulties. By 1949 he had arrived at
the formula √
M/m = (3/16 π)α −2 λ−3
proton decay, had a striking similarity to Dirac’s idea of 1930, based on his first version of hole
theory, that p+ + e− → 2γ should occur somewhere in nature.
111
A. Landé, “Sommerfeld’s fine-structure constant and Born’s reciprocity,” Physical Review
56 (1939), 482–483. See also Landé, “The ratio of e, c, and h,” (ref. 97), where he admitted that
his theory did not allow him to predict α unambiguously. In Landé, “Sommerfeld’s fine-struc-
ture constant,” Physical Review 57 (1940), 345, he reported the theoretical value 136.08 for α −1 .
Landé later changed his view about the fine-structure constant and in 1961 he denied that the
numerical value of α had any significance. “Neither α ∼ 1/137 nor α multiplied by any particular
factor has quantitative interest. . .. seeing any numerological significance in the value 1/137 = 2π
times e2 / hc is indulging in the popular game of fooling oneself.” Comment to Yourgrau, “Some
problems” (ref. 137), on p. 343.
112
Landé to Pauli, 11 October 1940, in Karl von Meyenn, ed., Wolfgang Pauli. Wissenschaftli-
cher Briefwechsel, vol. 3 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), p. 44.
113
M. Born, “Reciprocity and the number 137, part I,” Proceedings of the Royal Society
(Edinburgh) 59 (1939), 219–233.
426 H. Kragh
−2
√ again shows the characteristic α variation.
which His best theoretical value of λ was
3 π /2 = 0.846 which, with M/m = 1837, gives α −1 = 102.5. Of course, this was not a
very good value, but Born comforted himself that, “It cannot be expected that a primitive
theory like that suggested here could give exact numerical results.”114 Shortly thereafter
he seems to have come to the conclusion that the theory was not satisfactory after all and
that the mystery of α remained unsolved. He had great hopes for his new reciprocity-
based physics, but the hopes did not materialize. He eventually came to recognize
his work in the area as nothing but mathematical speculations and “wasted time.”115
His theory suffered the same fate as so many other candidates for a unified theory,
Eddington’s included. Yet his fascination with the fine-structure constant remained. In
his obituary of Sommerfeld, he wrote:
Strangely enough, it [α = 2πe2 /ch] seems not to have been noticed before it appeared
in Sommerfeld’s formula. Its importance lies in the fact that it shows clearly an intimate
connexion between elementary charge and quantum, for which present theory can offer
no explanation. . .. Thus Sommerfeld’s discovery indicates one of the most fundamental
problems for the future of physics.116
As we have seen, the first sentence is not justified.

The fate of Born’s attempt to construct a unified field theory, and the role played
by the fine structure in it, was to some extent replayed in Heisenberg’s later and even
more ambitious unified theory that he developed in collaboration with Hans-Peter Dürr
and others. From the very beginning it was a requirement that the theory should lead
to a numerical derivation of the fine-structure constant. In 1957, at an early stage in
his research program, Heisenberg reported that from a crude model theory he obtained
α −1 ∼= 267. “The fact that one gets a definite value of this constant of the right order of
magnitude, seems to indicate that the model is in this respect not too far from the truth,”
he wrote.117 Eight years later, after much hard work, he found Sommerfeld’s constant
to lie in the interval 100 < α −1 < 170, but only by using the empirically known masses
of elementary particles.118 Heisenberg’s unified field theory failed, and it was no more
successful in deducing the value of α than earlier unified theories were.
114
M. Born, “Reciprocity theorem of elementary particles,” Reviews of Modern Physics 21
(1949), 463–473, on 473.
115
M. Born, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978),
p. 285. Not without reason, Born saw similarities between the spirit of his work and the theories
of Eddington and Milne, and he felt that he had to excuse that he had “succumbed to the attention
of this reciprocity idea.”
116
M. Born, “Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld,” Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal
Society 8 (1952–53), 275–296, on 284.
117
W. Heisenberg, “Quantum theory of fields and elementary particles,” Reviews of Modern
Physics 29 (1957), 269–278, on 276.
118
W. Heisenberg et al., “Quantum electrodynamics in the nonlinear spinor theory and the value
of Sommerfeld’s fine-structure constant,” Il Nuovo Cimento 38 (1965), 1220–1242, on 1231. See
also the review in Hans-Peter Dürr, “Heisenberg’s einheitliche Feldtheorie der Elementarteilchen,”
Nova Acta Leopoldina 55 (1982), 93–136.
10. Does alpha vary in time?
As recent as 2001, physicists and astronomers were taken by surprise when analysis
of absorption lines from quasars suggested a fine-structure constant varying in time.119
The value of α seems to have been smaller in the past, with α/α = −0.72 ± 0.18)·10−5
for redshifts in the range 0.5 < z < 3.5. (The redshift z is defined as the relative change
in wavelength, λ/λ = (λ − λ)/λ, where λ refers to the wavelength as received on
earth and λ to the laboratory value; it is a measure of the object’s distance from earth,
by r = zc/H , where H is Hubble’s constant.) The variation corresponds to a change
of α with time of (α/t)/α = 5 · 10−16 per year. The new observations are believed
to have great consequences for fundamental physics, especially for grand unification
and theories of the early universe. If α really is varying, it is believed that other “con-
stants” (such as the other coupling constants, the cosmological constant, and the proton
mass) also have been different in the distant past. A fine-structure constant varying in
cosmological time is usually seen as implying a change in the electric quantum e but
there also are theories that assume the speed of light c to vary. The implications for
cosmology of a varying fine-structure constant are currently examined by physicists and
astronomers.120 I shall not be concerned with these very modern developments except
to use them retrospectively, that is, to take a brief look at the early history of the subject.
Shortly after the introduction of the expanding universe, based observationally on
Edwin Hubble’s redshift-distance relation, several scientists suggested alternative theo-
ries to save the cherished static universe. Some of the alternatives assumed that one or
more of the natural constants vary in time. For example, J. Chalmers suggested in 1935
a non-Doppler interpretation of the observed redshifts by assuming e2 increases linearly
and h exponentially with time; although he did not mention the fine-structure constant,
his suggestion implies α = α(t).121 Samuel Sambursky proposed instead that h decreas-
es with time, and he took α to be constant “for reasons of quantum mechanical stability.”
He therefore was forced to assume a varying elementary charge.122 A somewhat similar
result, although based on a very different theoretical foundation, followed from Edward
A. Milne’s theory of kinematic relativity.123 The assumption that a constant α masks
119
M. T. Murphy et al., “Possible evidence for a variable fine-structure constant from QSO
absorption lines: motivations, analysis and results,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society 327 (2001), 1208–1222. See also www.astro.psu.edu/users/cwc/fsc.html and Jean-Phil-
lippe Uzan, “The fundamental constants and their variation: observational status and theoretical
motivations,” xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/0205340 (2002) for a careful review of the variation of
fundamental constants.
120
E. g., John D. Barrow, Håvard Sandvik, and João Magueijo, “The behavior of varying-alpha
cosmologies,” Physical Review D 65 (2002), 063504.
121
J. A. Chalmers, “The expanding universe – an alternative view ,” Philosophical Magazine
19 (1935), 436–446.
122
S. Sambursky, “Static universe and nebular red shift,” Physical Review 52 (1937), 225–338,
and further elaborated in S. Sambursky and M. Schiffer, “Static universe and nebular red shift,
II,” Physical Review 53 (1938), 256–263.
123
E. A. Milne, Kinematic Relativity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), p. 185.
428 H. Kragh
time variations in the constituent factors h and e can of course take many different forms.
Proposals from the 1960s included (h, e) ∼ (t −2 , t −1 ) and (h, e) ∼ (t, t 1/2 ).124
Only with Dirac’s cosmological hypothesis of 1937 and its further development by
Jordan did a more than casual interest arose in the possible variation of physical constants
over cosmic time. Dirac’s theory was based on the near numerical equality of e2 /GMm
and the present age of the universe To expressed in atomic time units e2 /mc3 , from
which he concluded that G(t) ∼ t −1 . He took the atomic quantities α and M/m to be
true constants, although he vaguely suggested that, “Future developments may require
these quantities to vary slowly with the epoch.”125 Inspired by Dirac’s casual comment,
Jordan considered the question in a paper of 1939 in which he argued that it could be
solved empirically, namely, by examination of the spectra of distant galaxies. If α de-
pended on time, it would result in complex spectral shifts that had not been observed,
and for this reason he dismissed the hypothesis.126
In 1948, in an attempt to refute Dirac’s G(t) hypothesis by means of geophysical and
astrophysical arguments, Edward Teller mentioned briefly the possibility that the inverse
fine-structure constant might be proportional to the logarithm of the age of the universe.
But he found the possibility uninteresting because the change would be negligibly small
“even if it should be real.”127 Two years later, Josef Brandmüller and Eduard Rüchardt
from Munich pointed out that the age of the universe accepted at the time (the Hubble
time, about 2 billion years) was in good agreement with
= 137 = α −1
3/2
lnTo
If the formula was significant, it would mean an α slowly decreasing with time. However,
logarithmic relations of this type are too insensitive to be of much value, and Brandmül-
ler and Rüchardt did not take the coincidence very seriously.128 A somewhat similar
proposal was made in 1957, when Raimondo Baggiolini introduced what he called a
124
K. P. Stanyukovich, “Possible changes in the gravitational constant,” Soviet Physics–Dokla-
dy 7 (1963), 1150–1152. John O’Hanlon and Kwok-Kee Tam, “Time variation of the fundamental
constants of physics,” Progress in Theoretical Physics 41 (1969), 1566–1598.
125
P. Dirac, “A new basis for cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 165 (1938),
199–208, on 202.
126
P. Jordan, “Über die kosmologische Konstanz der Feinstrukturkonstanten,” Zeitschrift für
Physik 113 (1939), 660–662.
127
E. Teller, “On the change of physical constants,” Physical Review 73 (1948), 801–802. It
should be pointed out that the comments on Teller’s paper in Dyson “Time variation” (ref. 135),
Dyson, “The fundamental constants” (ref. 136), Barrow, “The lore of large numbers” (ref. 11), and
Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (ref. 11) are probably not historically
reliable. Teller considered, but did not suggest any α −1 ∼ ln t hypothesis, at least not in print.
Also Gamow, “Numerology” (ref. 134) referred, wrongly, to “the possibility proposed by Teller
in 1948.” Curiously, Teller later referred to his brief consideration as a suggestion. See E. Teller,
“Are the constants constant?” in Reines, Cosmology, Fusion and Other Matters (ref. 94), 60–66,
on 64.
128
J. Brandmüller and E. Rüchardt, “Die Sommerfeldsche Feinstrukturkonstante und das Prob-
lem der spektroskopischen Einheiten,” Die Naturwissenschaften 37 (1950), 337–343.
universal system of measure, essentially a modification of the Planck units.129 In units

of “cronos” (about 5 · 10−43 sec), he found the Hubble time to be T = 3.15 · 1059
and noticed that ln T = 137 = α −1 , a relation he believed might have theoretical
significance.
The possibility of a time-varying fine-structure constant was seriously considered
only in 1967. Six years earlier, George Gamow had received a letter from Dirac in which
the British physicist suggested that it was time to revive his old idea of a gravitational
constant varying in time. “We do not know whether h̄c/e2 is a constant or varies pro-
portional to log t,” Dirac wrote. “If it does vary, the chemistry of the early stages [of
the earth] would be quite different, and radio-activity would also be affected.”130 Dirac
apparently saw a varying α as a means to reconcile his G(t) hypothesis with the age of
the earth. However, although Gamow was greatly fascinated by Dirac’s Large Number
Hypothesis, he was unable to accept what Dirac considered a consequence of it, a vary-
ing gravitational constant.131 As an alternative to the problematic G ∼ t −1 he suggested
e2 ∼ t and therefore α ∼ t, which allowed him to retain the formula e2 /GMm ∼ t.
He showed that the charge-variation hypothesis would have no serious geophysical and
astrophysical consequences, such as Dirac’s G(t) had. As to spectroscopy, he noted that
the hypothesis implied a redshift in all galactic spectra because of R = α 2 mc2 /2h ∼ t 2 .
While such a uniform shift cannot be distinguished from the Doppler redshift, the fine
structure splitting (proportional to the fourth power of α) should be able to serve as a
test. Shortly after Gamow submitted his paper, he realized that new measurements of
the fine structure splitting in quasars contradicted his hypothesis.
It can be shown that there is a relationship between α/α and the redshift z, namely
α/α = 1/2[(λ/λ)z /(λ/λ)0 − 1]
where λ is the wavelength separation and λ the mean wavelength of a particular doublet
as measured in an object of redshift z and in the laboratory (index 0). The method, which
gives a direct measurement of α, was first used in 1956 by M. Savedoff who applied it to
the radio source Cygnus A of redshift z = 0.06. He obtained α/α = (1.8 ± 1.6) · 10−3
or α /α = 1.0036 ± 0.0034, where α refers to the radio source data and α to laboratory
data. Consequently he concluded that the fine-structure constant was “indistinguishable
in two galaxies 3 · 108 light years apart.”132
After the discovery of the more distant quasars, John Bahcall and Marten Sch-
midt used the same method to measure fine structure doublets from five quasars with
redshift z ≈ 0.2, corresponding to a travel time of the photons of about 2 billion
years. They reported α /α = 1.001 ± 0.002, where α now refers to the quasar
129
R. Baggiolini, “On a remarkable relation between atomic and universal constants,” American
Journal of Physics 25 (1957), 324–325.
130
Kragh, Dirac (ref. 83), p. 237.
131
G. Gamow, “Electricity, gravity, and cosmology,” Physical Review Letters 19 (1967),
759–761. See also H. Kragh, “Cosmonumerology and empiricism: The Dirac-Gamow dialogue,”
The Astronomy Quarterly 8 (1991), 109–126.
132
M. P. Savedoff, “Physical constants in extra-galactic nebulae,” Nature 178 (1956), 688–689.
430 H. Kragh
data.133 Since Gamow’s α ∼ t hypothesis required α /α = 0.8, it was ruled out

observationally, which Gamow quickly admitted.134 In addition to Bahcall and
Schmidt’s refutation, the same issue of Physical Review Letters included objections
by Freeman Dyson and Asher Peres based on nuclear-physical and geological evi-
dence, respectively.135 Shortlived as the α ∼ t hypothesis was, it stimulated several
researchers to examine the question more closely. The answer in the early 1970s was
unambiguous, namely, that there was no evidence from either theory or observation to
support the hypothesis of a time-dependent fine-structure constant.136 This remained
the consensus view for thirty years until the new quasar observations shattered the
peace.
11. Conclusion
The dimensionless combination of natural constants 2π e2 /ch was discussed by a

few physicists even before Sommerfeld turned it into a spectroscopic quantity, the fine-
structure constant. During the period from 1915 to about 1930, α was considered just
another atomic parameter and there was no concern with its inverse value. This changed
drastically with Eddington’s theory of 1929, which directed attention to α −1 and its
seductive nearness to a whole number, 137. Only then did physicists start searching for
a deeper meaning of α and ways to derive its value from fundamental theory. At about
the same time it was recognized that the constant plays the role of a coupling constant in
the interaction between electrons and photons. Although Eddington’s attempt to derive
the value of α from mathematical and epistemological considerations failed, it helped
greatly in turning the constant into a fundamental and “mysterious” quantity. This is to
a large extent still how many physicists consider it.
Of course, not all physicists have been equally receptive to the magic of the fine-
structure constant, or to the lore of dimensionless constants in general. The idea has
been criticized repeatedly by physicists and philosophers alike, many of whom have
followed Wolfgang Yourgrau in his scornful rejection of what he called “constatology”
(of which alpharology may be considered a subset). At a 1959 conference, Yourgrau dis-
missed some physicists’ “strange predilection for so-called dimensionless magnitudes,”
a play with numbers that to him was nothing but “a source of amusement rather than of
133
J. Bahcall and M. Schmidt “Does the fine-structure constant vary with cosmic time?” Phys-
ical Review Letters 19 (1967), 1294–1295.
134
G. Gamow, “Numerology and the constants of nature,” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Science (USA) 59 (1968), 313–318.
135
F. Dyson, “Time variation of the charge of the proton,” Physical Review Letters 19 (1967),
1292–1293. A. Peres, “Constancy of the fundamental electric charge,” Physical Review Letters 19
(1967), 1293–1294.
136
Ya. M. Kramarovskii and V. P. Chechev, “Does the charge of the electron vary with the age of
the universe?” Soviet Physics Uspekhi 13 (1971), 628–631. F. Dyson, “The fundamental constants
and their time variation,” in Abdus Salam and Eugene Wigner, eds., Aspects of Quantum Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 213–236.
information.”137 Yet, although most physicists may agree withYourgrau, history testifies
to the enduring appeal of the rationalistic dream of basing physics on a small number of
dimensionless constants. It is a dream that is very much alive in the early years of the
twenty-first century.
The saga of α is also instructive with respect to the relationship between mundane
experiments and high theory. Eddington thought he could deduce the exact value of
the fine-structure constant, and when his deduction was contradicted by experiment he
found a loophole in his theory to revise the predicted value. Yet, although for a short
period it might look as if α −1 = 137, refined experiments soon proved Eddington
wrong. Rather than abandoning his theory, he argued in various ways that the agree-
ment in fact was nearly perfect. From his point of view, the theory was not falsified.
However, the vast majority of physicists either ignored Eddington or decided that his
arguments were hopelessly artificial. What matters in the relationship between theory
and experiment is not only agreement – any comprehensive theory can be brought to
agree with some fact – but agreement based on good experiments and sound theoretical
arguments. To almost all physicists, Eddington’s arguments were obscure, unpersuasive
and unsound.
Acknowledgments. Parts of the present work derived from an invited lecture given in Munich,
April 2001, in commemoration of Arnold Sommerfeld. I thank the organisers of the conference.
History of Science Department

University of Aarhus
Ny Munkegade
8000 Aarhus, Denmark
ivhhk@phys.au.dk
(Received September 12, 2002)

Published online April 2, 2003 – © Springer-Verlag 2003
137
W. Yourgrau, “Some problems concerning fundamental constants in physics,” in Herbert
Feigl and Grover Maxwell, eds., Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 319–342, on 332. Yourgrau saw no reason to accept the fine-
structure constant as particularly fundamental or interesting.

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Arch. Hist. Exact Sci.

Magic Number: A Partial History

1. Introduction: The fine-structure constant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

1. Introduction: The fine-structure constant

2. Between Planck and Sommerfeld

h/2π = (4πe)2 /c or (α −1 =) hc/2π e2 = 16π 2 = 157.9

The Stefan constant a relates to Planck’s constant h by

h = (e∗2 /c)(8π 5 /15)1/3

The equation can be rewritten as

hc/2πe2 = 8π(8π 5 /15)1/3

2πe2 /ch = (4π)−2 (15/π 2 )1/3

a quantity he called q, but that we (a bit anachronistically) shall refer to as α. Allen

e = 9α 2 · 10−6 and e/m = α 2 · 1022

α = (15/π 8 212 )1/3 = 7.281 · 10−3

π/24 33 , 7/π 6 , 32/45π 4 , and 32 /53 π 2

3. The fine-structure formula

where W = E − Eo is the electron’s binding energy. As a first-order approximation, the

4. From quantum mechanics to Eddington

Sommerfeld, the “great-grandfather” of the fine structure theory, had reason to be

5. Toward quantum electrodynamics

6. A number derived a priori

on his unorthodox conception of the fine-structure constant.50 (Confusingly, Eddington

h = (M/m)(e2 /c)(π − 1)−1

or, expressed in terms of the fine-structure constant,

Table 1. Determinations of the inverse fine-structure constant, 1929–1957. Abbreviations: PR =

author year value source

R. Birge 1929 137.29 ± 0.11 ref. 53

7. Responses to Eddington’s theory

world picture.”73 Sommerfeld continued to follow at a distance Eddington’s work, and

mHe /mH = (ZHe /ZH )2 (1 + α)−1 = 4(1 + α)−1

µ + µ−1 + 2 = (2kπ )/α,

to calculate the maximum number of chemical elements.92√Their argument was basically √

9. Max Born and the number 137

As we have seen, the first sentence is not justified.

10. Does alpha vary in time?

universal system of measure, essentially a modification of the Planck units.129 In units

α/α = 1/2[(λ/λ)z /(λ/λ)0 − 1]

data.133 Since Gamow’s α ∼ t hypothesis required α /α = 0.8, it was ruled out

The dimensionless combination of natural constants 2π e2 /ch was discussed by a

History of Science Department

(Received September 12, 2002)

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α/α = 1/2[(λ/λ)z /(λ/λ)0 − 1]