Part 5/8:
Even two and a half millennia after Pythagoras, this investigation continues. We turn to the work of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum field theory, who made extraordinary observations. Dirac compared the forces of electricity and gravity and found a staggering numerical ratio: ten to the power of forty.
He discovered this same number when he calculated the total number of elementary particles in the universe, raising it to the power of two. As he examined various processes, that number recurred, leading him to believe he had stumbled upon a fundamental order underlying the universe.