When Max Born addressed the South Indian Science Association in November 1935, it was a time of great uncertainty in his life. The Nazi Party had already suspended the renowned quantum mechanics physicist's position at the University of Gottingen in 1933. He had been invited to teach at Cambridge, but it was temporary. Then, the Party terminated his tenure at Gottingen in the summer of 1935. Born took up an offer to work with C. V. Raman and his students for six months at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. While there, he found that his family had lost its German citizenship rights. He was stateless and without a permanent home. And then, there was this uncertainty about two numbers.
The scientific world had been coming to terms with two numbers that had emerged after a series of discoveries and theories in the previous four decades. They were unchanging and they had no units. One, the fine structure constant, defined the strength of interactions between fundamental particles and light. It is expressed as 1/137. The other, mu, related the mass of a proton to an electron.
Born was after a unifying theory to relate all the fundamental forces of nature. He also wanted a theory that would explain where these constants came from. Something, he said, to “explain the existence of the heavy, and light elementary particles and their definite mass quotient 1840."
It might seem a little bizarre that Born worried about a couple of constants. The sciences are full of constants—one defines the speed of light, another quantifies the pull of gravity, and so on. We routinely use these numbers, flipping to dog-eared tables in reference books, and coding them into our software without much thought because, well, they are constants. But the weird thing about such constants is that there is no theory to explain their existence. They are universal and they appear to be unchanging. So is the case with the masses of protons and electrons. But time and time again, they are validated through observation and experiment, not theory.
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