Following the path of earlier unificationists, one of Eddington's aims was to reduce the contingencies in the description of nature, for example, by explaining the fundamental constants of physics rather than accepting them as merely experimental data. One of these constants was the fine-structure constant ..., which entered prominently in Dirac's theory and was known to be about 1/137.
Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
eddington, fine-structure-constant, history-of-science, physics