Thursday, March 15, 2007

137

Sometime back our team had a lot of fun using number 137 to estimates unknown requirements. We could have used another number like pi but pi was a known number and less likely to believe by the project office.
137 is a mysterious number mentioned by physicists as the value of the fine-structure constant (the actual value is one over one-hundred and thirty seven), which is defined as the charge of the electron (q) squared over the product of Planck's constant (h) times the speed of light (c). This number actually represents the probability that an electron will absorb a photon. Pauli the famous physicist did a lot of research about this number and he died at room 137.
137 is the odds that an electron will absorb a single photon. Protons and electrons are bound by interactions with photons. So when you get 137 protons, you get 137 photons, and you get a 100% chance of absorption.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We use 3 months on our projects all the times.

Mehrdad said...

Dron sent me this paper on the same topic (magic number).

Here is the timeless paper:



http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/