lucky us because if you want to study the fundamentals of electromagnetism something that is essential for gaining a deeper understanding of somerfeld's work on the fine structure constant brilliant offers one of the best courses on this subject it's called electricity and magnetism and requires little to no prior knowledge of the subject what makes this course so brilliant is that you'll be able to see the concepts you learn in action through hand-picked demos and as always brilliant makes the learning process fun by inserting interactive quizzes after learning every new concept this keeps you engaged and helps you retain the information long term brilliant has a special offer for arvind ash beers right now get started for free by clicking the link below the first NUMBER_TOKEN people to click the link in the description will get NUMBER_TOKEN off your subscription this is a great opportunity to give brilliant a try so be sure to click the link in the description so the next question is how is the fine structure constant measured alpha can be measured experimentally at cyclotron accelerators like fermilab in illinois this is done by accelerating an electron in a magnetic field and measuring its magnetic moment in very general terms the electron acts like a spinning bar magnet the magnetic moment is related to the strength and direction of the magnetic field created by this electron the alpha value can then be figured out from this measurement now why is the number one over NUMBER_TOKEN so significant well for one thing it's a small number this means that electromagnetism is relatively weak at least compared to the strong nuclear force the consequence of this is that electrons orbit on average at a substantial distance away from the proton this can be understood explicitly from the bohr radius which is the radius of a hydrogen atom where a naught is the radius each bar is the reduced planck's constant me is the electron mass c is the speed of light and alpha is the fine structure constant we see that because the radius of the atom depends on the inverse of alpha then a smaller alpha gives us a large radius for example if the nucleus of an atom was the size of a golf ball the size of the electron probability cloud would extend to two and a half kilometers this distance allows electrons to be relatively available for exchange with other atoms so that chemistry can take place and thus life is possible on the other hand this number is not too large because otherwise atoms would not form in the first place so in our universe it is relatively balanced not too low and not too high you might say the fine structure constant is in the goldilocks zone in NUMBER_TOKEN english astronomer fred hoyle and others worked out the process by which stars produce heavy elements such as carbon on nitrogen and oxygen they found that the abundance of carbon in the universe could be explained only if the fine structure constant had a value that made the nuclei of helium atoms more likely to fuse to produce carbon nuclei than otherwise this higher probability of fusion makes it possible for all these heavier atoms like carbon to exist and the existence of these elements is the reason life exists on earth scientists calculated that if this constant was different by about four percent we may not have had these heavier elements because either helium would not fuse or stars would burn out too quickly due to too much fusion what then determines the value of alpha well scientists are still trying to figure this out since there's no theory that predicts it some believe that the value
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN lucky us because if you want to study the fundamentals of electromagnetism something that is essential for gaining a deeper understanding of somerfeld's work on the fine structure constant brilliant offers one of the best courses on this subject it's called electricity and magnetism and requires little to no prior knowledge of the subject what makes this course so brilliant is that you'll be able to see the concepts you learn in action through hand-picked demos and as always brilliant makes the learning process fun by inserting interactive quizzes after learning every new concept this keeps you engaged and helps you retain the information long term brilliant has a special offer for arvind ash beers right now get started for free by clicking the link below the first NUMBER_TOKEN people to click the link in the description will get NUMBER_TOKEN off your subscription this is a great opportunity to give brilliant a try so be sure to click the link in the description so the next END_SPONSOR_TOKEN