Pilgrims' progress in search of the fundamental constants

Abstract

The practice of making broadly inclusive surveys, from time to time, of the status of our knowledge of the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry may be said to have started with a famous paper by Raymond T. Birge, of Berkeley, published in Reviews of Modem Physics in 1929. To Professor Birge, also, is due the credit for being the first, as far as I know, to apply the method of least squares in order to determine most probable values of three of the constants; e, the electronic charge m, the electron rest mass; and h, Planck's constant, using a highly overdetermined set of experimental data on functions of these three quantities.