Many have argued that research on grand unification or local realistic physics will not be truly relevant until it makes predictions verified by experiment, different from the prediction of prior theory (the standard model). This paper proposes a new strategy (and candidate Lagrangians) for such models; that strategy in turn calls for reconsideration of Schwinger's magnetic model of matter. High priority should be given to experiments which fully confirm or deny recent scattering calculations which suggest the presence of van der Waals effects in low energy p-p and pi-pi scattering, consistent with Schwinger's model and inconsistent with QCD as we know it (with a mass gap). I briefly discuss other evidence, which does not yet rule out Schwinger's theory. A recent analysis of hadron masses also seems more consistent with the Schwinger model than with QCD.
The goal of this paper is to suggest how reconsideration of Schwinger's "magnetic model of matter" (MMM) 1 can help us overcome some of the roadblocks towards a larger goal: the development of a mathematically well-posed and unified model of how all the forces of nature work together, capable of predicting the full spectrum of empirical data from the laboratory. MMM itself is not such a model -but neither is anything else available to us today. Rather, MMM can be useful as a kind of tool in coping with three major roadblocks which are limiting our progress towards that larger goal. In this introduction, I will start by discussing the larger goal, and mention MMM only as it connects to some of the key subgoals.
In all honesty -the goal of grand unification is not the only motivation here. I will argue that the most promising approach to building a finite unified field theory in 3+1 dimensions is to start from bosonic models which generate solitons; however, a bosonic unified theory would also have profound implications for the foundations of physics. Because of the many exact results which now exist for classical-quantum equivalence in the bosonic case 2,3,4 , such a theory would seriously re-open the possibility of local realistic models powerful enough to address the complex empirical database of physics today. Section III-4 will discuss this further, but this paper will mainly address the issue of grand unification in 3+1 dimensions, which is certainly a challenging enough starting point.
The three greatest roadblocks to the larger goal, in my view, are: (1) the theoretician/experimentalist divide, most notably the huge distance between true unified models like superstring theory and the practical phenomenological models used to make sense of the mid-to-low energy nuclear experiments which are the bread and butter of large nuclear laboratories today 5 ; (2) the physics/mathematics divide, the difficulty of formulating nontrivial quantum field theories which are truly well-posed according to the standards of mathematicians 6,7,8 or even the more humble standards of rigorous engineers; (3) the mass prediction gap (not to be confused with the mass gap 6 ), the impossibility of really predicting the masses of quarks or leptons when using theories like quantum electrodynamics (QED) 9,10,11 or quantum chromodynamics (QCD) 12,11 which only become meaningful when we attach elaborate, nonphysical systems for regularization and renormalization as part of the definition of the theory.
The original motivation for this paper came from the theoretical side. Like the superstring people, I began by asking: “Can I come up with a well-defined quantum field theory which is finite, which reproduces all the tested predictions of the standard model of physics, but does not require renormalization and regularization as part of the definition of the theory?” However, unlike the superstring people, I asked: (1) can we do it without requiring additional, speculative dimensions; and (2) can we do it even without gravity, just to get started?
The biggest reason why QED requires renormalization is that the energy of selfrepulsion of an electron will always be infinite, if we assume that the charge of an electron is all concentrated at a single point. The mass-energy predicted by a point-charge model will always be infinite, unless we adjust it in an ad hoc manner, through renormalization. Superstring theories can be finite, because they assume that the electron has a kind of nonzero radius -very small, as small as the Planck length, but that is enough. There is an easier way to achieve the same effect -by modeling the most elementary particles of nature as solitons 5,13 , as compound systems whose charge is distributed over a finite region of space.
Of course, distributing the charge is not sufficient by itself to give us all that we need, but it is essentially a necessary condition; thus in order to get to the larger goal, this is the necessary starting point. Some physicists would worry whether there is any hope at all here; to create solitons, we need interaction terms which are not bilinear, and can any model of that sort be well-defined without renormalization? In fact, superstring theories have shown that this is possible, in principle; in any case, there is no mathematical result saying that models with third order nonlinearities cannot be well-defined without renormalization. In previous work 4 , I have reviewed the extensive theoretical work and strong theorems for classical-quantum equivalence, which can provide both upper and lower bounds on energies and masses in bosonic field theories. One of the many important new opportunities ahead of us here is to exploit this equivalence, to prove that all of the Lagrangians discussed in section III do in fact yield finite well-defined theories.
Soliton models like the Skyrme model 5,13 have in fact been very popular at times in empirical nuclear physics. They have been used t
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