Richard Feynman

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.’ We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!”

Malcolm H. Mac Gregor

“The mystery about α is actually a double mystery. The first mystery — the origin of its numerical value α ≈ 1/137 has been recognized and discussed for decades. The second mystery — the range of its domain — is generally unrecognized.”

Wolfgang Pauli

“Why 1/137?”
(If he had the ability to ask God one question)

Warren Johnson

“The reason for 1/137 is much deeper than some coincidence with angles, number sequences or even religions. It is very likely that the fine structure constant was this finely tuned for some final end (to put it Socratically and teleogically) not yet realized by humans. Whether the human race is the reason/final end, or just a step on the journey only time will tell.”