Here’s an interesting posting from Richard Kaczynski’s FB feed:
“Psychologist Imants Barušs once tested a medium by asking her to contact the spirit of physicist Richard Feynman and provide answers to specialist questions beyond the medium’s knowledge. Once contact was established, Barušs asked the spirit for the ‘fine-structure constant,’ which is approximately 1/137. The medium answered, ‘Zero. Eight.’ Barušs cut her off, saying that was incorrect. The spirit protested and mentioned something about a capital M. Barušs responded, ‘There is no capital M.’
A week later, Barušs’ colleague, Julia Mossbridge (capital M), heard of the encounter and shared this quote from Feynman:
“‘There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e–the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won’t recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597..)’
Any other physicist might have said 1/137, or 0.00729; but Feynman would have given √0.00729 or .08542455. BOOM.
[Paraphrased from I. Barušs and J. Mossbridge (2017), “Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness” (Washington, DC: APA), 193-4.]
