Congratulations!

Congratulations!

We’ve hit a round number of subscribers!

Thank you for being here.

I’m not Ramanujan, and not every number feels like a close friend. Still, when I watched the subscriber count slowly crawling up, I couldn’t help noticing some famous “nice” stops: 100, 125, 128… And now we have 137. This one I just can’t skip. It’s a crossroads of different disciplines. So buckle up — let’s dive in.

In Bohr’s model, if you calculate the speed of an electron in the ground state and express it as a fraction of the speed of light, you’ll get a number close to 1/137. This is the fine-structure constant — a key character in quantum theory. It’s a kind of bridge between light and matter: it tells you how strong (how “efficient”) the interaction between the electromagnetic field and matter is.

Now let’s compute the exact value of this ratio:

1/137 = 0.00729927007299270...

The period is 07299270. A palindrome. That’s a pretty rare occasion. I didn’t check it deeply, but I do remember one thing: within the first couple thousand natural numbers it’s unique. Back in 10th grade I even had a homework task: write a program that prints the periodic and non-periodic parts of 1/n for different n. And yes — a long scroll of decimals for n = 1…2000 lived with me for quite a while.

And one more small gem: 729 = 27×27 = 9×9×9. I don’t believe in numerology… but this bunch of facts is still weirdly satisfying.

Stay tuned!