by Giulia Cassarà
Michael Pareto, cosmologist (narrator):
What connects the failure of power grids across three continents, the sudden unreliability of GPS, a mass bird die-off along ancient migratory routes, and a twelve-hour panic that brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war?
The answer is a number. Maybe you’ve never heard of it, but this strange number, roughly 1/137, also called the fine-structure constant or Sommerfeld constant or simply alpha, determines how tightly electrons hug atomic nuclei, how light interacts with matter, and how molecules bond. The fine-structure constant is a dimensionless number that governs all electromagnetic phenomena—“all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it,” as Richard Feynman described it. Max Born considered it “the central problem of natural philosophy.” Many scientists speculated that the constant might be subject to change as the universe ages. In fact, throughout the history of science, researchers have measured drifts. Still, these have always turned out to be false alarms or measurement errors, and, quite frankly, it’s not the best subject for securing funding or writing grants.
In this special episode of Astonishing Tales of the Universe, we’re going to speak with scientists to understand what is happening in the cosmos and how, as a civilization, we should better prepare for the consequences.
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Marinka Vitnik, metrologist:
As a metrologist at NIST, my main job is maintaining cesium fountain clocks and optical lattice clocks that define the official second. Our job is critical. What I actually do is make sure that when you say “one second,” it means the same one second in Boulder as it does in Paris, Tokyo, or on a GPS satellite. Sometimes my husband calls me Chronos, although I don’t devour my own children. Haha!
Anyway, that February, I noticed an anomaly when comparing the cesium and strontium optical clocks. The ratio between these two frequencies was drifting. That meant the atoms of one or both clocks were not wiggling with the same frequency. This was bad, okay? We have based our entire civilization on the assumption that we can’t lose a second in 300 million years.
My first reaction was It has to be a mistake. But when I saw the aurora borealis outside, I thought, Something is going on. I had goosebumps. Like now. Look at my arm. I’ll never forget that day.
My colleagues thought that it was a solar storm. It made sense because extreme solar activity can cause geomagnetic and atomic interference. After twenty-four hours, I sent an email to Holger, my colleague and friend at the PTB, which is the equivalent of our Institute, but in Germany. He replied within minutes, saying his engineers had reported similar anomalies in their ytterbium-cesium comparisons. The Paris Observatory confirmed the same. The National Metrology Institute of Japan followed.
Something was going on.
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Ken Bellicus, defense intelligence analyst:
I’ll be blunt. We initially thought it was an attack. We received various reports of GPS timing anomalies affecting multiple weapons. Without a synchronized time, it is a disaster for us. Imagine missing a target or worse, hitting something or someone else. I can’t say more than that; it’s classified. But we went DEFCON 3 within a few hours.
For eighteen hours, the United States and China were at elevated nuclear alert, each believing the other might have been responsible for an attack. But then we received a briefing from the scientific community suggesting a natural phenomenon. We had no protocol for “the fine-structure constant is changing.” Our analysts were skeptical. Some suggested the scientific explanation was itself disinformation spread by the enemies. But we couldn’t deny that the world was experiencing the same phenomena. So we intercepted communication from hostile countries. They were having the same experience as us, and their analysts were apparently suggesting that we had deployed a new weapon. So the leaders of our two countries exchanged information openly. That call probably saved us from nuclear war.
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Michael Pareto, cosmologist (narrator):
But despite initial fears of attack, the omnipresence of auroral activity made scientists hypothesize that it was a violent solar storm, like the Carrington Event of 1859, that set telegraphs on fire. However, solar observatories hadn’t reported anything unusual in the Sun’s activity. Massive bird die-offs had been reported along traditional migratory routes. The Northeast American grid experienced a twelve-hour brownout the following week. GPS was unreliable, causing car accidents all over the world. The military had been deployed in most countries to contain public hysteria and civil unrest. Many independent researchers investigated what was happening, and what they found was deeply unsettling.
Measurements of the atomic transition frequency of hydrogen, helium, and other elements revealed shifts. Astronomers compared recent light signatures from stars with older archival data. They discovered that certain fine details in the patterns had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Although some redshift is expected because the universe is expanding and stretching light as it travels, this extra shift suggested something else was going on.
This is when Nobel laureate Erik Svensson proposed a bold idea: the drifting clocks and the unusual auroras weren’t separate problems and weren’t caused by either warfare or solar storms. They were symptoms of the same thing, a change in one of the basic rules governing the universe.
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Erik Svensson, Nobel-winning physicist
At a certain point, toward the end of a career, a physicist will get obsessed with either quantum consciousness or the fine-structure constant. Unfortunately, for me, the obsession was the latter.
All the data pointed to the same hypothesis. It wasn’t obvious at first, but I knew where to look because years ago, I argued that the universe was entering a new era, no longer dominated by dark energy.
The fine-structure constant has always been tied to the universe’s age. Many other, more brilliant physicists before me had speculated that the constant was not a constant at all. But of course, the conjecture was rejected multiple times in the past. I don’t blame my colleagues. We’ve only known alpha’svalue with an accuracy of eleven digits in the last decade. And the word ‘constant’—I don’t know—it makes scientists instinctively skeptical. As if a constant can’t change, ever. But when you have a Nobel, everybody listens. I’m glad that the scientific community’s response was open. Because we don’t really have much time.
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Michael Pareto, cosmologist (narrator):
If alpha were slightly larger, electrons would be bound too tightly to their nuclei for complex chemistry to occur. If slightly smaller, electrons would not bind at all, and atoms as we know them would not exist. In practice, humanity could not have existed if alpha were different. So what are the implications for the world, for our biology, if the number that shapes the electromagnetic force changes?
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Timons Seaias, biochemist:
I am fueled by coffee and barely two hours of sleep every night. There is a lot to do. I’m monitoring protein folding dynamics. I’ve been tracking DNA replication in bacterial cultures. Every enzyme in your body is a finely tuned machine that exploits quantum tunneling, which depends on how electrons behave around nuclei.
You didn’t know you were a quantum machine? Surprise.
But what keeps me awake at night—well, besides the coffee—is the effect on DNA. The double helix is held together by hydrogen bonds between base pairs. These bonds have a specific strength, a specific geometry. The replication machinery that copies your DNA has evolved over billions of years to work with those geometries and forces. It’s unlikely we can adapt in such a brief amount of time. Not if alpha keeps drifting.
A significant drift could increase mutation rates. We should expect to see higher rates of cancer. Viruses replicate fast and sloppily, and now they’ll replicate even sloppier, which means more variants, faster mutations. And here’s the fun part. An immune response depends on all of those things affected by alpha. So you have faster-mutating pathogens and a compromised immune system trying to keep up. Yeah. The human body has efficient error correction mechanisms, but we’re adding stress to a system that already operates near its limits.
But the effects on photosynthesis terrify me. We’re concerned that it could devastate plants, similar to when the asteroid impact plunged the Earth into darkness millions of years ago and led to mass extinction.
If the drift gets bigger and bigger, then… we’re basically extinct. Game Over. Insert coin to continue. No? Okay then.
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Veronica Ricci, theoretical physicist:
There’s a chance we might become extinct! It was about time, eh? Look, I don’t have kids, and I got divorced recently. What am I clinging to? I’m actually happy. We pollute the planet. We cause constant suffering with animal farming. We have all these modern comforts, yet we are so miserable. I don’t believe in God, but I think the change in the fundamental constant of physics might be proof that the universe is alive and listening.
I had purchased this bottle of Prosecco five years ago, waiting for an occasion like this. Look at it, it’s a Nicola Gatta. I’m gonna celebrate tonight with my cat, Galileo. Like we say in Rome: Daje!
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Michael Pareto, cosmologist (narrator):
But Veronica is not the only one to be happy. Despite official efforts to maintain information control, there is a saying that “a secret is better kept by a toddler than by a scientist.” Some are even celebrating the possibility of extinction, seeing it as a chance to “start over.” But for most, the leaked information triggered widespread public anxiety and civil unrest. Panic buying, bank runs, stock market collapse. Some people wrapped their homes and themselves in aluminum foil, believing it would “shield” them from the changing electromagnetic force.
Others have joined movements like Free from Coulomb, where they are building a self-sufficient community with no electricity or electronics.
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Claire Abbott, elementary teacher:
Frankly, I’m concerned about the mental health of my students. It has been… difficult to explain what’s going on. And I think that’s fueling the public hysteria. Because from our perspective, from a child’s perspective, nothing looks different. The sky is the same. The classroom is the same. But their parents are scared, and kids absorb that.
It’s hard for me, as an English teacher, to explain atomic clocks and fine-structure… whatever it’s called. I teach how to conjugate the past tense, not physics.
What I’m seeing now: half my class is hungry. The panic buying and the hoarding left some families, especially here in the city, with no groceries, no food. We started a breakfast program, then a lunch program, and now some kids stay for dinner. The cafeteria staff are saints. We have many volunteers and generous donors. And then there are the kids whose parents just… aren’t home. Police officers, nurses, National Guard—they’re working double shifts, sometimes gone for days. When they come home, they’re exhausted. We have children sleeping in the gymnasium because there’s no one home to take care of them.
I appreciate the science communicators who’ve come to talk to the students. They try. But I’ll be honest with you: I’m not scared of what’s happening to the universe. I’m scared, as usual, about humans.
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Michael Pareto, cosmologist (narrator):
There are still so many questions. Are the auroras correlated with the shifting alpha? Researchers are still modeling how. Will the fine-structure constant drift again, or will it stabilize to its new value? What strategies will the metrology institutes adopt?
We can be optimistic. If alpha stops drifting, we can adapt and recalibrate electronics to this new value. But if the drift becomes larger, there is a chance that life, as we know it, will be fundamentally altered.
As Wolfgang Pauli once said: “When I die, my first question to the Devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?”
Our question to the Devil might be: “What the hell is going on?”
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Bio:
Giulia Cassarà is an Italian writer who needs coffee before coffee. She holds a PhD in Data Science and writes short stories about the academic life she thought she’d have. She also publishes unsolicited personal essays on Substack, because the world was clearly asking.
Philosophy Note:
During my PhD research on the fine-structure constant, I became fascinated by a peculiar tension: we’ve built our entire civilization on the assumption that certain numbers in physics are constant, yet we have no explanation for why they take on these specific values. This story is a thought experiment: what happens when that assumption fails?
The story explores how fragile our existence is, dependent on parameters we neither control nor fully understand. Veronica’s half-joking suggestion that “the universe is alive and listening” points to something serious: perhaps the cosmos has an agenda, and we are not its central concern. Or maybe we are, but not in ways we can understand. The universe aged through radiation-dominated and matter-dominated eras; why should it stop evolving now, simply because we’re here?
