I have this question: Where does the fine structure constant come from? Is it derived? Is it assumed? I will be most thankful if you will also include other detailed info that you think is also good to know, or just suggest a reading on it.
[Physics] Where does the fine structure constant come from
atomic-physicsinteractionsphysical constantsquantum-electrodynamics
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Dear Claude, you are extrapolating electromagnetism way too high. You're going from low energies to the Planck scale, assuming that nothing qualitatively changes, but this assumption is wrong.
The fine-structure constant is essentially constant below the mass of the electron - the lightest charged particle - which is 511,000 eV or so. You are extrapolating the running of the electromagnetic fine-structure constant $\alpha = 1/137.03599$ all the way up to the Planck scale, about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 eV. I chose to avoid the scientific notation to make it more explicit how far you have extrapolated.
However, at the electroweak scale, about 247,000,000,000 eV, which is much lower than the Planck scale, the electromagnetic force is no longer the right description. The weak nuclear force gets as strong and important as electromagnetism and in fact, they start to mix in nontrivial ways. The right theory doesn't use $U(1)_{\rm electromagnetism}$ but $SU(2)_{\rm weak}\times U(1)_{\rm hypercharge}$. Note that the electromagnetic $U(1)$ is not the same thing as the hypercharge $U(1)$.
So instead of the fine-structure for the electromagnetic $U(1)$, one must express physics in terms of the fine-structure constants for the new $SU(2)$ and $U(1)$ electroweak gauge groups. These fine-structure constants are not as tiny as the electromagnetic one.
The hypercharge $U(1)$ fine-structure constant gets stronger as the energy grows - much like the electromagnetic one would - while the $SU(2)$ fine-structure constant gets weaker as the energy grows (however, it would be also getting stronger, like electromagnetism, if we included new $SU(2)$-charged particles such as superpartners).
At the same time, the $SU(3)$ QCD fine-structure constant is getting weaker as we raise the energy. Ultimately, all the three fine-structure constants, when properly normalized, become close near $10^{16}$ GeV which is the GUT scale - they exactly cross if one includes the superpartners of the known particles.
The common value of all these three fine-structure constants at the GUT scale is something like $1/24$ or $1/25$ - in fact, there exist somewhat preliminary arguments based on F-theory (in string theory) and similar frameworks that suggest that the number could be exactly $1/24$ or $1/25$ when certain conventions are carefully followed.
If your question was not one about the real world, but one about a fictitious world that only contains QED up to the Planck scale, then indeed, the fine-structure constant would increase just "somewhat", perhaps to $1/100$ or so; indeed, if the world were pure QED, the Landau pole with $\alpha=\infty$ would occur at much higher energies than the Planck scale.
The number can be calculated as a function of $\alpha_{E=0}$. However, it is meaningless to assign error margins to a theory with adjustable parameters that doesn't describe the real world - and QED above the electroweak scale doesn't. A theory that doesn't describe the real world is always in error, even when you're within any error margins, and you can't just "match" it to the real world because different ways of "matching" two different theories would yield different results.
No one knows, and, at the moment, there is no realistic prospect of computing the fine-structure constant from first principles any time soon.
We do know, however, that the fine-structure constant isn't a constant! It in fact depends on the energy of the interaction that we are looking at. This behaviour is known as 'running'. The well-known $\alpha \simeq 1/137$ is the low-energy limit of the coupling. At e.g., an energy of the Z-mass, we find $\alpha(Q=M_Z)\simeq 1/128$. This suggests that there is nothing fundamental about the low-energy value, since it can be calculated from a high-energy value.
In fact, we know more still. The fine-structure constant is the strength of the electromagnetic force, which is mediated by massless photons. There is another force, the weak force, mediated by massive particles. We know that at high energies, these two forces become one, unified force. Thus, once more, we know that the fine-structure constant isn't fundamental as it results from the breakdown of a unified force.
So, we can calculate the fine-structure constant from a high-energy theory in which electromagnetism and the weak force are unified at high-energy (and perhaps unified with other forces at the grand-unification scale).
This does not mean, however, that we know why it has the value $1/137$ at low energies. In practice, $\alpha \simeq 1/137$ is a low-scale boundary condition in theories in which the forces unify at high-energy. We know no principled way of setting the high-energy values of the free parameters of our models, so we just tune them until they agree sufficiently with our measurements. In principle it is possible the high-scale boundary condition could be provided by a new theory, perhaps a string theory.
Best Answer
The fine structure constant $\alpha=e^2/\hbar c$ is the only dimensionless quantity that can be built from the quantities $e$ (the electric charge), $\hbar$ and $c$ (the speed of light).
The latter quantities are physically important to understand the interaction of charged particles interacting with (quantized) radiation, hence the need to construct this dimensionless quantity from $e$, $\hbar$ and $c$.
Because of its small size, it is very useful as an expansion parameter in a perturbative approach as series will converge quickly.