Richard Feynman

 

Dena Bain Taylor

 

Discovering 137

Creative artists seek to reveal the patterns and inner mysteries of the human condition.

Writers are always sensitive to patterns and how to unify them into the fabric of our writing. Of our characters’ lives; of the world in which our characters live; of the thematic and language threads that weave through our writing...

Of course, if all that creative artists did was reveal patterns, art would be soporific, merely educational and boring. It’s the desire to know the unknown that keeps us exploring the depths of consciousness and experience.

What brought all this to mind was something more sublime than the artist’s daily task—the apparently humble number 137.

It turns out, I have recently learned, that 137 could lie at the heart of a Grand Unified Theory, relating the theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and gravity.

Richard Feynman said that all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. He called it one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics.

The tools that creative artists use to uncover these patterns and mysteries? Those represent our craft, be it language or music or visual media. But the impulse to reveal them stems from our connection to the greater patterns and mysteries of the universe.

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Image: Richard Feynman, Scientific American