The most successful mathematical prediction in history



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When James Jeans declared: "God is a pure mathematician!", He refers to the fact that most of the fundamental processes in nature are subject to elegant mathematical relations.
Science is very successful because theoretical scientists can use mathematics to make predictions that experiments can test.
Mathematics was used, to name but a few, to predict the presence of Neptune, radio waves, antimatter, neutrinos, black holes, gravity waves, and the Higgs boson.
Sometimes expectations are surprisingly accurate. Perhaps the most successful example of the power of physical theory relates to the mysterious state of the spinning electron.
Michael Faraday has long discovered that mobile electric charges generate magnetic fields; the electric current flowing around a wire roll is the basis of the electric motor, even the static electron has a magnetic field, because of the fact that all electrons spin.
Each electron has a similar amount of rotation. As with the charge, this internal rotation turns the body into a small magnet.
Of course, physicists want to know how powerful the magnet is. If the electron is treated as a small rotary ball, the calculation becomes easy, but the answer is only half of what the testers measure.
He interprets the contradiction through the inner rotation, which does not behave as normal, to illustrate the difference. Imagine a universe witch turning the earth upside down.
Another 180-degree turn would restore the natural state to a 360 degree turn back to its initial state.
So far, everything is clear. The problem is that if you rotate the electron over 360 degrees it does not return to its primary state, instead, you have to rotate it at 720 degrees.
Experimental physicists can conduct such a double-dipole for easy verification, so rotation in the form of circles carries a completely different meaning to the electrons.
Because of its strange behavior to the world around it, the power of electronic magnets has also multiplied.

Nature fills not only space space with virtual particles

All this was successful in the late 1920s, and was beautifully described as a simple stone-written formula within the Westminster Abbey to commemorate the work of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.
Dirac derived the peculiar engineering properties of electron rotation by combining quantum theory and relativity.
It may seem that the problem has disappeared but the problem now is that element 2 is not entirely true, revealing the exact measurement of the electron's magnetic field to be 0.1% higher than the Dirac equation's predictions. The solution of this paradox is the triumph of modern theoretical physics.
When the electrons move, they emit photons. To describe this process, quantum mechanics requires the physics of the microworld, whose mysterious rules allow the electron to emit photons into the vast world, and also to release and then quickly recapture the same photon.
Photons that have a fleeting existence are called only before they are again discarded as "virtual", distinguishing them from the "real" photons that fly outward.
According to this quantitative description, all electrons are covered within a cloud of virtual photons.
This virtual photon cloud leads to real, albeit small, physical effects, including a change in the electron's magnetic field somewhat.
The calculation of the rate of change is frighteningly difficult. The first attempt was made by Julian Schwinger in 1948, which found that there is a correction of factor 2 for α /,, where α is called the "microstructure constant", another profound number occurring in nature.
Its value is about 0.0023228, which has come a long way in solving the theoretical mismatch and experiment.
Schweinger's equation was engraved on his tombstone, but by the time he died in 1994, experimenters and theoretical scientists were in a race to calculate and measure the electron's magnetic field in increasing precision. Schweinger's calculation was the first approximation.
To improve it, it meant not only that the virtual photons surrounding the electron, but also the virtual electrons, were considered to be causing an outburst of particles that appeared in and out of existence. The computational effort in these processes was enormous.
However, both theory and experiment now agree on about one per trillion, which represents the most successful test of physical theory in history.
Aristotle said that nature detested space, that it was right; nature fills not only the space space with the drawing of virtual particles; it adorns the properties of electrons with instantaneous alterations, which may not be noticed before and for ever.
Source : Cosmos Magazine

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