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A graph of isotope stability, with some of the magic numbers. In nuclear physics, a magic number is a number of nucleons (either protons or neutrons, separately) such that they are arranged into complete shells within the atomic nucleus. As a result, atomic nuclei with a "magic" number of protons or neutrons are much more stable than other nuclei.
The numbers of nucleons for which shells are filled are called magic numbers. Magic numbers of 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126 have been observed for neutrons, and the next number is predicted to be 184. [6] [27] Protons share the first six of these magic numbers, [28] and 126 has been predicted as a magic proton number since the 1940s. [29]
For example, the phrase "the least number not expressible in fewer than eleven words" sounds like it should identify a unique number, but the phrase itself contains only ten words, and so the number identified by the phrase would have an expression in fewer than eleven words after all.
Wigner's first example is the law of gravitation formulated by Isaac Newton. Originally used to model freely falling bodies on the surface of the Earth, this law was extended based on what Wigner terms "very scanty observations" [ 3 ] to describe the motion of the planets, where it "has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations."
The concept of magic numbers in the field of chemistry refers to a specific property (such as stability) for only certain representatives among a distribution of structures. It was first recognized by inspecting the intensity of mass-spectrometric signals of rare gas cluster ions. [ 1 ]
The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with constant probability strictly greater than 0 in any sample) result is likely to be observed. [1]
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 17 January 2025. Observation that in many real-life datasets, the leading digit is likely to be small For the unrelated adage, see Benford's law of controversy. The distribution of first digits, according to Benford's law. Each bar represents a digit, and the height of the bar is the percentage of ...
LNH was Dirac's personal response to a set of large number "coincidences" that had intrigued other theorists of his time. The "coincidences" began with Hermann Weyl (1919), [2] [3] who speculated that the observed radius of the universe, R U, might also be the hypothetical radius of a particle whose rest energy is equal to the gravitational self-energy of the electron: