May 4, 2013
May 24, 2012
April 22, 2012
Back to Blogging, Uploaded a paper I wrote in 1986 about Preonic Grand Unification
It has been almost 3 years since my last Blog post. Much of my time has been diverted into a condo hotel project in Longboat Key Florida, and the focus I need to do good physics has been impossible to come by. Then, the other day, Ken Tucker, a frequent participant at sci.physics.foundations, emailed me about some new research showing that electrons have constituent substructure. That brought me back immediately to the half a year I spent back in 1986 developing a 200-page paper about a preonic substructure for quarks and leptons, which culminated six years of study from 1980 to 1986. I finished that paper in August 1986, and then took an 18 year hiatus from physics, resuming again in late-2004.
Ken’s email motivated me to dig out this 1986 paper which I manually typed out on an old-fashioned typewriter, scan it into electronic form, and post it here. Links to the various sections of this paper are below. This is the first time I have ever posted this.
Keep in mind that I wrote this in 1986. I tend to study best by writing while I study, and in this case, what I wrote below was my “study document” for Halzen and Martin’s book “Quarks and Leptons” which had just come out in 1984 and was the first book to pull together what we now think of as modern particle physics and the (then, still fairly new) electroweak unification of Weinberg-Salam.
What is in this paper that I still to this day believe is fundamentally important, and has not been given the attention it warrants, is the isospin redundancy between (left-chiral) quarks and leptons. This to me is an absolute indication that these particles have a substructure, so that a neutrino and an up quark both have contain the same “isospin up” preon, and an electron and a down quark both contain the same “isospin down” preon. Section 2.11 below is the key section, if you want to cut to the chase with what I was studying some 26 years ago. I did post about this in February 2008 at https://jayryablon.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/lab-note-4-an-interesting-left-chiral-muliplet-perhaps-indicative-of-preonic-structure-for-fermions/, though that post merely showed a 1988 summary I had assembled based on my work in 1986, at the behest of the late Nimay Mukhopadhyay, who at the time was teaching at RPI and had become a good friend and one of my early sources of encouragement. This is the first time I am posting all of that early up-to-1986 work, in complete detail.
Lest you think me crazy, note that seventeen years later, G. Volovik, in his 2003 book “The Universe in a Helium Droplet,” took a very similar tack, see Figure 12.2 in this excerpt: Volovik Excerpt on Quark and Lepton Preonic Structure.
The other aspect of this 1986 paper that I still feel very strongly about, is taking the Dirac gamma-5 as a fifth-dimension indicator. I know I have been critiqued by technical arguments as to why this should not be taken as a sign of a fifth dimension, but this fits seamlessly with Kaluza Klein which geometrizes the entirely of Maxwell’s theory and is still the best formal unification of classical electromagnetism and gravitation ever developed. For those who maintain skepticism of Kaluza-Klein and ask “show me the fifth dimension,” just look to chirality which is well-established experimentally. Why do we have to assume that this fifth dimension will directly manifest in the same way as space and time, if its effects are definitively observable in the chiral structure of fermions? Beyond this, I remain a very strong proponent of the 5-D Space-Time-Matter Consortium, see http://astro.uwaterloo.ca/~wesson/, which regards matter itself as the most direct manifestation of a fifth physical dimension. Right now, most folks think about 4-D spacetime plus matter. These folks correctly think about 5-D space-time-matter, no separation. And Kaluza-Klein, which historically predated Dirac’s gamma-5, is the underpinning of this.
After my hiatus of the past couple of years, I am going to try in the coming months to write some big-picture materials about physics, which will pull together all I have studied so far in my life. I am thinking of doing a “Physics Time Capsule for 2100” which will try to explore in broad strokes, how I believe physics will be understood at the end of this century, about 88 years from now.
Anyway, here is my entire 1986 paper:
Preonic Grand Unification and Quantum Gravitation: Capsule Outline and Summary
December 11, 2008
Understanding the QCD Meson Mass Spectrum
Dear Friends:
It has been awhile since I last posted and it is good to be back.
Almost two years ago in the course of my work on Yang Mills, I came across what I believe is an approach by which mass spectrum of the massive mesons of QCD might be understood. I had what I still believe is the right concept, and many of the pieces, but I could not figure out the right execution of the concept in complete detail. Over the past year and a half I walked away from this to let the dust settle and to also arrive at a place where the basic principles of quantum field theory were no longer “new” to me but had become somewhat ingrained. Now, I believe I have found the right way to execute this concept, and the results are intriguing.
In the file linked below, which I will update on a regular basis in the coming days:
https://jayryablon.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/su-3-paper-20.pdf,
I review how mass is known to be generated in SU(2), as a template for considering SU(3) QCD. I have tried to explain as simply as possible, what I believe to be the origin of QCD meson masses, as well as to lay the foundation for theoretically predicting these. Keep in mind, finding out how the vector mesons of QCD obtain their non-zero masses, which make the QCD interaction short range despite supposedly-massless gluons, is one aspect of the so-called “mass gap” problem, see point 1) on page 3 of
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Yang-Mills_Theory/yangmills.pdf at
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/Yang-Mills_Theory/.
Then, I extend this development, in detail, to SU(3).
Several interesting results are already here:
1) This approach neatly solves the problem of propagator poles (infinities) in a manner which I believe has not heretofore been discovered. Goodbye to the +i\eta prescription, off mass-shell particles, and other inelegant dodges to achieve a finite propagator.
2) This approach may solve the confinement and the mass gap problems simultaneously. It is important to understand that electroweak SU(2)xU(1) is a special case in which the gauge bosons are synonymous with the observed vector mesons, but that in SU(3) and higher order theories they are not. The gauge bosons aka gluons, which show up in the Lagrangian, are not observed. What is observed are the vector mesons which pass through to the denominator of the propagator in the invariant amplitude.
3) There emerges is a quantum number that is restricted to three discrete values, and depending on which value of chosen, all the meson masses are scaled up or down on a wholesale basis. I believe that this may resolve the problem of generation replication.
I expect to be churning out mass calculations in the next day or two. You may wish to check out the meson mass tables at http://pdg.lbl.gov/2008/tables/rpp2008-qtab-mesons.pdf, because that table contains the data which I am going to try to fit to equation (6.1), via (6.5).
Hope you enjoy!
Jay.