A few trivia about the fine structure constant

Clifford Pickover

In a post I published in this blog over three years ago, I talked about the fine structure constant and some of its physical peculiarities. In this post I am going to talk about some of its mathematical peculiarities. I have taken them from a book I have mentioned on other occasions: A Passion for Mathematics, by Clifford A. Pickover.

As we know, the most exact value of this constant is this:

α = 1/137.035999206

Pickover points out that Eric W. Weisstein, in his World of Physics website, offers two mathematical approximations incredibly close to this value:

Black holes or gravastars?

As I explained in a previous post, our two fundamental physical theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, predict infinities that physicists don’t like. General relativity does this in gravitational singularities: the Big Bang and black holes. Quantum mechanics, in vacuum energy and the quantities that must be renormalized in quantum field theory.

Until a little time ago, the theory of black holes, formulated by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1930, stated the following: when a star 30 to 70 times more massive than the sun undergoes a supernova explosion, it expels most of its mass, but a part of it (at least 3.8 times more massive than the sun) collapses to such a point that it occupies zero volume, and so it will have an infinite density.

The dream of antigravity

Man has always wished to be able to fly. Seeing how birds do it and not being able to do it has obsessed him, to the point of causing quite a few accidents. It is a craving that even very young children know. Some mishaps caused by the viewing of the movie Superman at the end of the seventies may be proof.

At the end of the 19th century, two fundamental interactions were known: electromagnetic and gravitational. In one respect, both are quite different. Electrically charged bodies can have a positive or a negative charge. A positive and a negative charge attract each other; two positive or two negative charges repel each other. Likewise, magnetic bodies have two ends with magnetism of a different type, north and south. If we bring two magnets together, the north end of one and the south end of the other attract each other; ends of the same type repel each other.

Does science explain everything?

William Shakespeare

Scientism is the philosophical theory that affirms that science is the only valid source of human knowledge. Taken literally, this statement sometimes leads to absurd conclusions. Perhaps the following case is an example of scientism. I’ve taken it from a recent article by Joseph Pearce entitled Shakespeare and Science.

Kathryn Harkup, British doctor in chemical sciences and science communicator, has published several books analyzing various literary works from the point of view of science. I don’t know if Harkup is a case of scientism, but her emphasis on science makes me think that perhaps she is. She has recently published a book titled Death by Shakespeare, where she criticizes how Shakespeare presents death in his plays, based on what she believes science modern knows about death. Pearce highlights two examples, which show some of the absurd conclusions caused by basing only on science.

Contradictions of naturalism

Mary Midgley

Several times I have pointed out some of the contradictions stated by naturalist philosophy and its different variants: materialism, reductionism, physicalism, scientism, etc. In the previous post I pointed out that Raymond Tallis has detected two important contradictions that he calls darwinitis and neuromania. In this post I am going to bring together a few more, because when one sees them together their power is multiplied. Here are those I have selected:

• Science is the only valid source of human knowledge: Which science has reached this conclusion? Physics? Biology? None of the sciences. Therefore, if what this statement says is true, this statement must be false. We arrive at a contradiction. On the other hand, if this statement is false, there is no problem. Ergo, this statement is false. Therefore, scientism (and thus naturalism) is false.

Neuromania and Darwinitis

Raymond Tallis

Chapter 11 of the book The Naturalist Worldview of Moisés Pérez Marcos, which I discussed in the previous post, is dedicated entirely to the philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who despite his atheistic religious stance opposes some of the modern exaggerations of reductionist naturalism. Tallis published a book in 2011 titled, significantly, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity. This book describes two very widespread philosophical pathologies, which emerge from professional journals and educated colloquiums to discussions in the pub or TV screens. (Pérez Marcos, paraphrasing Tallis). They are the following:

Naturalism or naturalisms

La cosmovisión naturalista (The Naturalist Worldview) is a monumental book, written in Spanish by Moisés Pérez Marcos, about naturalist philosophies. As with the multiverse, of which there are many different theories, usually incompatible with each other, there are (almost) as many naturalistic philosophies as there are naturalistic philosophers. In other words, they don’t agree among themselves.

The first thing to do when confronted with naturalism is to try to define it and differentiate it from related worldviews: