An anecdote from Metafilter user range, answering a question about the strong nuclear force and gravity and black holes and apparently freakish coincidences in quantum physics
One of the perks of studying undergrad physics at MIT was taking third-semester quantum mechanics from someone who had an honest-to-god Nobel Prize. He (who shall remain nameless) was doing a test prep session with the class one night and at one point got to an expression that looked like this:
… at which point he stares hard at the board, then looks at us (~50 senior physics majors). Then at the board. Then us. Then back to the board, where he (a little sheepishly) reduces it to:
When we all got done laughing he retaliated with:
“Look. Experimentally, we don’t know the value of this number [points at alpha] better than within 2 orders of magnitude, and nobody can think of a way to measure it any better. The difference between pi and 3 is 5%. The simpler expression is going to hold true enough for some time between 50 years and forever. So shut up.”
