Over the years I wrote several short papers and lecture notes touching on the fine-structure constant (α ≈ 1/137). Some of these appeared on viXra, others were used as slides for YouTube lectures, and still others were scattered across different notes and working papers on my ResearchGate page.
I recently decided it was time to bring those ideas together into a single, more coherent manuscript. The result is a new preprint — Revisiting the Meaning of the Fine-Structure Constant — which I have now uploaded on ResearchGate. The earlier slides remain available as supplementary material.
The motivation for the paper is simple. In popular physics, the fine-structure constant is often presented as a mysterious number. Richard Feynman famously asked why the universe “chooses” a value close to 1/137. Instead of treating α as a mystery, the paper asks a more basic question: what physical quantities does this dimensionless ratio actually compare?
Seen from that perspective, several familiar appearances of α fall into place.
First, the constant emerges as a geometric scaling ratio between characteristic electron length scales, linking the classical electron radius, the Compton radius, and the Bohr radius in a simple ladder.
Second, the constant can be interpreted as a ratio of energy–length scales, comparing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction (through the Coulomb factor) with the quantum-relativistic action scale (which combines Planck’s quantum of action h and lightspeed).
The paper also revisits the appearance of α in the hydrogen spectrum and, yes, also briefly discusses its role as the electromagnetic coupling constant in quantum electrodynamics (QED). In fact, the latter addition is an unusually sympathetic look at the modern perturbative approach that is so common in modern quantum field theory: we acknowledge we used AI to make sure it would not sound too biased. 🙂
In any case: taken together, these perspectives suggest that the fine-structure constant is less mysterious than often suggested. Rather than being an inexplicable number, it acts as a compact bridge linking classical electromagnetism, quantum theory, and atomic structure.
Reading Feynman 
Are you aware of the book “The Power of α: Electron Elementary Particle Generation with α-Quantized Lifetimes and Masses” by Malcolm Mac Gregor? I haven’t read it, thus, I’m not sure whether it is relevant.
I googled and look at the book summary. From the summary on Amazon (“this book is centered on the most pressing unsolved problem in elementary particle physics — the mass generation of particles”), it is not quite clear what ‘camp’ the book is in. If it is yet another discourse on QFT (generating Higgs or other exotic fields to explain mass), then I would not be interested… I wrote a short follow-up paper clarifying my stance on electromagnetic mass: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401680129_The_Classical_Electron_Radius_Revisited_A_Dynamical_Interpretation_from_a_Ring-Current_Model_of_Charge … Kindest regards – Jean Louis
I’m not sure what theory Mac Gregor’s work is based on; he published an arXiv preprint (arXiv:0806.1216) that might explain it. To me it looks more like a kind of parton model than a model based directly on QCD or any other QFT – but I don’t know.
Anyway, thanks for the link to your new paper. I have a question about this sentence: “… the century-old ring current model, which was first proposed by Alfred Lauck Parson in 1915, and then implicitly assumed by Schrödinger …”. I’m not sure what the “implicitly assumed” means here.
In my understanding, Parson proposed an actually “ring-shaped” electron, while Schrödinger thought of a much smaller (almost point-like) electron moving in a circle (of similar size as Parson’s ring). I guess the two models are equivalent when you only look at time-averaged quantities. Is that what you mean by “implicitly assumed”?