How a Humble Heretic survived Hubristic Humiliation

 

 

By Richard L. Ropiequet

 

A risible resolve, which impels an outsider to spend decades upon a revolution­ary new theory of physics, is hard to explain to wife, friends, and neighbors.  You appear to them like Thaddeus P. Toad, all aflutter with curious ideas that make no sense at all!  You have no job, no contract with the government, no support from any foundation, no affiliation with any university; in fact you have no legitimacy whatso­ever!  If your wife loves you, as mine does, and is able to keep house and finances in order while you spend money on fancy computers, and squander your time on one false lead after another, you are indeed lucky!  And, if you actually achieve something noteworthy, and start crowing about it, you are blessed beyond measure, if she refuses to call the local nut house to have you put away!

 

The Role of Outsiders in Science   An outsider is anyone interested in a field of science for which he is academically unqualified.  Insiders consider outsiders a plague of locusts, incessantly buzzing around, consuming valuable time spent in squashing them.  Even when an outsider contributes something of value, insiders are annoyed.  "Hell, this idea isn't new!  I've thought of many times, but never got around to writing it down!"

 

Corrective Feedback for Loners   When one works alone, with no chance to try out creative ideas on friends and associates, the only corrective influence is time.  An enchanting idea must not only outshine all its contemporary alterna­tives, but must continue to glow in the light of repeated appraisals.

 

Encouragement for Loner-Heretics   Encouragement for loner-heretics comes in the form of rebuffs!  You get these, simply by talking about your radical ideas.  If I had needed this kind of encouragement, I could have obtained rebuffs every day of the thirty-five years of this investigation, simply by informing some physicist of my book's thesis.  I'm not that much of a masochist, but this opportunity exists, because there is a heap of hubris in the hallowed halls of High-Energy Physics!  Please do not interpret this as criticism ─ there is plenty of justification for these hallowed people to feel superior.  And these rebuffs were useful to me, for they showed me how different my engineering type mind is from that of a mathematical physicist, and what a huge chasm I must bridge to gain an audience for my ether theory.

 

Definition of a Theory   A theory is an ordered series of concepts gleaned from a colossal clutter of creative ideas.  You pluck the fruit of truth atop a rubble pile of discarded notions!

 

Creating Theories   The creation of a new theory is a multi-stage process, passed on from one individual to another.  I view my role as snatching ideas from the formless void, and arranging them to tell a story which is meaningful to me.  Whether these ideas become a theory is beyond my control ─ only my successors will determine this!

 

Theoretical Advancements   Any new theory advances in cogency by successive purges of misconceptions.  At any stage in its development, it will contain flaws.  When these are discovered, a defender of the status quo breathes a sigh of relief ─ but so does a proponent of the theory!  Solve this flaw, and the theory is greatly strengthened!

 

How a New Theory Evolves   Understanding complex phenomena requires the mental agility to leap back and forth among the components of partial comprehen­sion until some new, and higher, gestalt emerges.  Often the list of components necessary for the gestalt is not complete, or, if complete, is not comprehended with equal clarity.  Frequently knowledge of one component is vital to understanding another, so a serial ap­proach is required.  The worst case is one in which all the compon­ents of partial comprehension need to be understood in order to understand any of them.  Here, one may need to learn in a circular manner, overcoming unclarity gradually by repeated visits, and the serial order of these visits may not have much significance.

 

This latter mode of activity is, of course, the way any theoretical advance is made.  You stew over a motley bunch of half-baked ideas, perhaps for years, until some begin to please you, and you work with these until they begin to cluster into family relationships.  Numerous gestalts will then begin to occur, most of them only temporarily appealing, until some idea suddenly blinds you with its potential bril­liance.  It is still only half-baked, but you know it will work out!  And it does ─ but it may still take years to find all the ancillary ideas that make a case compelling enough to publish.

 

Theoretical Moods   Any theoretician progresses from perception to exception to rejection to dejection, from hunch to crunch to lunch, from soaring to boring to snoring, from elation to conflation to deflation to vacation, and from zoom to gloom to tomb!

 

How a Model of Space Made IPP Possible:  The stimulus for my new geometric approach was an article, "Photons as Hadrons", by Frederick V. Murphy and David E. Yount, in the July 1971 issue of Scientific American.  This paper described experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in which photons billions of times more energetic than visual-light photons were caused to strike targets of various metals from beryllium to uranium.  Rather than being merely reflected or absorbed, these energetic photons occasionally reacted with the various atomic nuclei to produce large quantities of pions.  This led the authors to specu­late that perhaps high-energy photons took on a hadronic character, so that they transmogrified on collision with matter into vector mesons, which then decayed into pions within a few nuclear diameters.

 

My reaction was that this interpretation, while clearly justified, missed an obvious point: Perhaps what had transmogrified was not the impinging photon, but, rather, space, itself!  Perhaps space is ­com­posed of the "ingredients" of matter, and energy somehow rearranges these ingredients of space to produce matter.  This simple deduction launched a chain of ideas which led to this book.

 

My matter-from-space investigations began with the notion that particles were de­fects in the space lattice, but after mulling this for a few weeks, it became clear to me that the essence of a particle is not its defect composition, but, rather, it is the distortion pattern its defects induce into the space lattice.   Trying to visualize a lattice defect was hard enough, but how do you visualize its three-dimensional distortion pattern stretching to infinity?   I decided to construct a model of bipolar space, using Q-tips, the opposite ends of which I dipped into bright orange and blue Hyplar paint.  After these were dry, I laboriously sewed groups of six like-colored ends together to produce an 7x7x7 cubic lattice, which I suspended inside a cubic frame by rubber bands connected to each node on the six faces of the cubic Q-tip structure, so that the naturally floppy structure would assume a cubic shape, but would be free to be distorted.

 

This effort, born of my need for physical objects to manipulate to really understand something, proved to yield the crucial concept upon which IPP depends.  And, without this model of space, I am certain I would never have thought of it!  Having built the model, I now needed some way to simulate a defect and one easy way was to squeeze and fasten together adjacent Q-tip nodes of the same-color any where in the 7x7x7 cubic lattice.  This action would be equivalent to removing one of these two like-charge entities, thereby producing a charge-effect in the lattice equal to, but opposite to the charge of the missing ECE.

 

The pattern in the Q-tip lattice which resulted from this squeez­ing action was astounding!  The surrounding cubic elements of the lattice became distorted such that along one diagonal all the face-diagonals were compressed, or contracted, while along the opposite diagonal, all the face-diagonals were expanded.  If the squeezing were done in the center of the model, the contraction/expansion distortion extended over the entire model, and the distortion at the external faces of the model showed clearly that this contraction and expansion would extend to great distances.

 

I soon was pinching together multiple points in the structure, observing that the total distortion was considerably reduced if two points along a common cardinal axis of the lattice were pinched together in opposite face-diagonal directions, while the distortion was accentuated if they were pinched in the same direction.  Something of more subtlety then became apparent.  If the pinchings had op­posite slants, and were of the same color, they would be an odd number of lattice units apart; if they were of opposite color, they would be an even number apart.  This seemed to be of noteworthy significance, but just how I could use it in my quest was not imme­diately apparent.

 

About this time I began to think more deeply about the implica­tions of using rigid Q-tips to form the lattice, rather than making the connections compliant, such as with springs, or stretchy materials, as I had originally intended.  With rigid interconnections, I had made the equivalent of a crystal lattice composed of incompressible spheres all in contact with each other,  where each node was at the center of a sphere.  Of course, this was true only if one limited the displacements to rather small angles from orthogonality, for the unsupported structure would collapse into a shallow heap.

 

When I viewed my lattice as a group of touching spheres, it became evident that the result of pinching two nodes together was equivalent to one sphere disappearing, while the other moved midway between the two previously undisturbed lattice locations.  With a few more years of thinking, this action became my definition of a "collapsed-void" ("c-void") defect in the space lattice, while the reduced distortion produced by cardinally related c-voids of opposite slant, became the mechanism by which two c-void defects became married togeth­er, forming a defect-pair. 

 

The reason for bonding together was not at all clear until I began to associate lattice distortion with lattice shrinkage, and lattice shrinkage with both energy and mass.  When this notion is accepted, it is obvious that two isolated collapsed defects would create more distortion, and hence would sum to more mass-energy than two defects married together by distortion cancellation.  Since energy would have to be supplied to move paired c-voids apart, they would perhaps form a stable particle!

 

The notion of defects paired together in a cardinal lattice direc­tion immediately suggested clusters of paired defects utilizing the other cardinal directions of a cubic space lattice.  Would not a proton, being the most stable of the complex particles, have three defect-pairs, one in each of the three cardinal directions?  This idea seemed so compelling, that I accepted it at once, even though I could see no means of proving it, and the requirement of six defects meant that each defect could possess only half an electron's charge, if the defect cluster were to have a unit positive charge (4 plus, 2 minus c-voids).

 

This insight led quickly to others.  If a c-void defect is assigned half an electron charge, then a simple void would also have half the electron's charge, and so also would an excess defect which vacated a void; therefore the excess defect could not be the electron, as I had initially speculated.  What could create a defect having double the charge of a void defect?  Suppose we could remove an elemental charge entity (ECE) of one polarity from the lattice and then replace it with one of opposite polarity?  Would not each action produce a half-charge effect of the same polarity, leaving the lattice doubly charged?  This out-of-place ECE (which I called a "replacement defect"), became my electron, or positron.

 

I was elated to have found plausible defect structures for the two basic building blocks of matter, but perplexed about which defect structures to associate with the other three members of the lepton family, the muon, and the electron and muon neutrinos (the tau had not been postulated at that time).  I could think of only two other defect possibilities, the simple void defect and an excess defect.  Each of these could have only half the electron's charge, whereas the muon was assumed to have the same charge as the electron, and both neutrino types were assumed to be without charge!  I gave some thought to the possibility that opposite polarity voids might join together to form a neutral electron neutrino, and a couple of these duos might cluster together to form a muon neutrino.  And, perhaps, two excess defects  of the same polarity might somehow join together to form a muon, but it seemed highly unlikely!

 

An unpalatable alternative was to consider that perhaps physi­cists had erred in their charge assignments of these particles; maybe muons and neutrinos are half-charged, instead.  I couldn't recall anyone even speculating about this possibility, so this did not seem a very viable notion, and I dismissed it with lingering affection.

 

These insights took just a few years, but they created a surety that I was onto something profoundly significant, and gave me the motivation to devote full time to exploring its potential.

 

Did Fred Hoyle's 1957 book, The Black Cloud, play a part?  A small group of scientists, in Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud have established temporary dominance over the entire world by being the only group able to communicate with a huge cloud sur­rounding our sun, whose shadow threatens to freeze the earth's people. They have learned that the "cloud" is a sentient being of vastly superior intelligence, of incorruptible rationality, very busy with its own affairs, but apparently willing to impart some of its advanced physical knowledge to them.

 

You know the rest ─ the "bright boy" volunteers first to sit in front of the apparatus designed by the cloud.  He is entranced, mesmerized, immobilized, as new patterns of understanding envel­ope his mind, creating a wild storm of thoughts so irresistible, and yet so destabilizing to his scientific indoctrination, that he is over­come with "brain fever", and dies.

 

Who will be next, after this outcome?  Only, Chris, the leader of the Group!  He has a scheme to avert the same fate: he will ask the "cloud" to go slower, and resolves not to contest the "cloud's" con­cepts, but will just subordinate his own beliefs whenever there is a conflict.  The scheme almost works, but, in the end, Chris finds himself in an intolerable state, where the two irreconcilable view­points cannot be kept in separate compartments, but merge and destroy his brain.  Just before the end, he has a moment of sanity, and observes, "The height of irony is that I should experience this singular disaster, while someone like Joe Stoddard (the simple-minded estate gardener) would have been quite all right!"

 

So what led Hoyle, in 1957, to imply that our current under­standing of the cosmos was vulnerable to drastic reformulation?  Was it the flack he was getting from Big Bang proponents over his Stea­dy-State Universe postulate?  Or did he perceive that Quantum Mechanics was so divorced from common sense, that its proponents would be completely unnerved to find that there was, after all, a common sense way of reconciling all its odd, contradictory aspects?  Surely the knowledge imparted by the cloud was not the "Equation of Everything", because that insight would merely have produced a smile of understanding, undergirded with envy!  No, to have induced a brain-damaging fever, the Cloud's information must have been truly revolutionary ─ something that inverted all the scientist's perceptions about the microcosm.  The most logical inference we can make is that the Cloud imparted something revolutionary about the characteristics of space, itself, since his organism spread into trillions of cubic kilometers of it.  Perhaps the Cloud suggested that space was actually an unimaginably dense crystal of two elemental charge entities, and then showed how all known phenomena derived from the interactions of just these two elementary particles.  Would that insight be mind-boggling enough to destroy a physicist's brain?

 

Had this powerful imagery of Hoyle's 1957 novel created a latent predisposition toward space-lattice theories in my mind, ready to be ignited by a chance Scientific American article?  I don't know!  But I would like to think that IPP is according to Hoyle!

 

Preserving Equanimity When Faced with Rejection:  We heretics, nowadays, have a much easier life than was true in the Middle Ages, when you were burnt at the stake, or placed under lifetime house arrest.  But it is, nevertheless, painful to the ego to spend hours on personal letters to numerous prominent physicists and cosmologists, describing your accomplishments, only to receive perhaps three or four replies out of over a hundred, and these re­plies  rather non-committal.  When you know you are right, this is baffling!  But one can rationalize this rejection by philosophical rumination on the diverse nature of minds:

 

Different Minds, Different Thoughts:   Every observant person has noticed that minds are as idiosyn­cratic as faces, or figures.  Some are sharp and quick, some vague and slow, some are reflective and involute, others dynamic and deci­sive.  In each of these types, we also find differences in proclivity, emphasis, and, to choose a modern metaphor, "programming".  Although any particular mind defies complete characterization, we recognize certain types ─ artistic, literary, pragmatic, mechanistic, mathematical, inventive, pedantic, legalistic, humanistic, and so on.

 

These differences lend excitement to life, but they also lead to many problems.  When exposed to the same learning situation, we absorb different things, reach different conclusions, and act in differ­ent ways.  And when we view the actions of others, we tend to think of them as "right", or "wrong", depending whether they are conson­ant, or antagonistic to our own impulses.  Ultimately, then, it is the tug and pull of these value judgments which shape the course of cooperative human behavior.  Whether an activity is sacred or secu­lar, business or academic, productive or hedonistic, pseudo or scien­tific, little can be accomplished unless the participants have similar backgrounds and thinking processes.  Without this commonality, their efforts will be dissipated in argument, strife, and bitterness.

 

Thus, the urge to accomplish something, rather than nothing, leads inexorably to mind-selecting processes in all major human activities.  These processes are, at first, informal and competitive, with much soul-searching and experimentation, and with numerous sub-groups bidding for supremacy.  Each sub-group strives to define a paradigm for the activity which will enlist the maximum number to its cause, hoping, thereby, to achieve dominance, so that the empha­sis can shift from politics to useful activity.  If this paradigm is skill­fully chosen, a variety of mind-types can be active toward the group goals, but it is never possible to define the activity so that all mind-types will be able to, or want to, participate.  And, indeed, it would be undesirable to include too many mind-types, since differences create disagreements, and disagreements slow the pace of the work.

 

As one group achieves dominance, the excluded participants in the original quest either switch to other pursuits, or continue to advance their divergent views, earning the opprobrium of their erstwhile associates, and, eventually, if they persist, being treated as heretics.  Either way, their competitive concepts of the paradigm are not promulgated, and gradually fade from view.  Not only is this true, but through control of the pedagogy, the dominant group will tend to pass on mainly those aspects of its paradigm which have proven most productive, thereby both narrowing the range of acceptable pursuits, and also further delimiting the mind-types who find the field possible and challenging.

 

What finally prevails in any mature group activity is a profes­sional class of participants with a relative narrow range of mind-types, who are predisposed to, and specially indoctrinated in, a narrowly defined paradigm which is assumed by them to encompass all desirable investigations and explorations, present and future.  This limited purview can be highly successful in ethical, literary, and artistic fields, and even in science, so long as the phenomena under consideration are consonant with the mental processes of the partic­ipants.  However, since Nature's bounty is unlimited, and man is clearly not omniscient, it is inevitable that moments of bafflement will eventually arrive which appear insoluble to the specially selected mind-types who comprise the professional cadre.

 

These moments of bafflement are common in scientific work, and quite often the pessimism which ensues proves to be unfounded, when renewed effort and new approaches vanquish the supposed "insoluble" problem.  Successes have been often enough, in fact, that even long-standing and seemingly intractable problems acquire a patina of pregnant possibilities in the ambience of other "impossible" breakthroughs.  But breakthroughs don't always happen!  Some prob­lems resist explication by the entire community of scientists for decades, seemingly placing the group's paradigm in jeopardy!

 

One would think, at this point, that these scientists would seek assistance from proponents of alternative paradigms.  Perhaps the narrowed focus of the reigning paradigm was unwise?  Perhaps the intractable problem would become intelligible, if it were viewed from a radically different perspective?  Alas, perish these heretical thoughts!  It is much easier to sweep these niggling difficulties under the rug, and just work on problems that have solutions!  If the rug gets too lumpy, just get a bigger rug!

 

Meanwhile, this rug debris, while cleverly rationalized away by the specialists, becomes fascinating to other mind-types, especially to those excluded during the period of paradigm squabble.  Maybe this is their day in court; find solutions for the intractable problems under the rug, and surely the reigning paradigmists will listen!  I have sad news for these out-of-favor mind-types: don't count on it!  From the perspective of reigning paradigmists, solving "rug" prob­lems is impossible; hence, anyone who claims to have done so is clear­ly a fool, whom all reigning paradigmists should (and will) ignore!

 

Mathematical-Type Minds vs. Engineering-Type Minds:   At the root of the differences in the thought processes between mathematicians and engineers are the different goals they seek.  The mathematician is interested in generalities, the engineer in specifics.  Thus, M is concerned with procedures, while E must be concerned with details.  They also pursue their goals differently:

 

M plunges into the water, heading north, for example, and swims under water with his eyes tightly closed, until he arrives at his destination.  He has faith that, providing every stroke is precisely determined, and his inertial guidance system is working, he will emerge in a glorious place, one fully worthy of his efforts.  A certain serendipity is hoped for, since his effort would be useless if he alrea­dy knew precisely where he would emerge.

 

E, on the other hand, must choose his destination before getting in the water.  He must swim on the turbulent surface, fighting the wind and waves, dodging flotsam and jetsam, and must keep his destina­tion ever in sight, through blinding reflections and irritating salt spray.  If his strength is adequate, and his goal is not a hallucination or a mirage, he knows precisely what to expect at his destination.

 

To achieve outstanding success in either field, a high degree of imagination, technical mastery, discipline, and fortitude is essential, and luck and Divine Guidance are most welcome.  But imaginationM is not imaginationE, just as skillM is not skillE.  The mathematician's imagination is poly-dimensional, and poly-chromatic, while the engi­neer's imagination must be in 3-dimensions, and in living Technicolor.  M's thoughts have no boundaries, and his visions are not limited to the real universe, while E's thoughts are confined to real-world possibilities, and his mental pictures must exclude the impossible and the impractical.  M seeks universality, elegance, and congruence; E seeks utility, appeal, and functionality.

 

The many differences in thought processes may suggest why there is a love-hate relationship, sotto voce, but nevertheless real, between mathematicians and engineers.  The epithets vary, but "ivory-domed theorists" vs. "bone-headed empiricists" captures the essence.  Neither group really understands how the other is able to get satisfaction from its activities, nor can one group fully compre­hend the thought processes necessary for success of the other.

 

What engenders this mutual animus ─ when it is readily appar­ent to both groups that scientific understanding is vitally dependent on both activities?  My answer, now painfully apparent to you, is that we are both victims of our happenstance mental programming, most of which took place in early childhood.  Each group is innocent of any malice ─ they are both just doing what comes naturally!

 

What has become a serious difficulty, however, is that mathe­maticians have become custodians of the Temple of Knowledge, and keepers of the Sacred Scrolls.  They decide what information needs to be preserved, and what language the scrolls are to be kept in.  We should not be surprised that this language is mathematics, and that they take delight in making the scrolls incomprehensible to practical minds.  Incomprehensibility has always been the goal of Keepers of the Sacred Scrolls ─ it enhances our awe of them, and dissuades us from invading their territory!

 

So, engineers, heed the words of the French revolutionaries: Come children of our profession! To arms! Form your battle groups! March on, march on!  Despite your impure blood, take your rightful place in Physics!  It needs your contributions!

 

A Change of Scene to a Lighter Vein:  I got rather serious, there, for a while.  Sorry!  Perhaps, a bit of levity will atone for my sins:

 

ARE THERE DEFECTS IN YOUR FUTURE?

 

This is for students, breaking symmetries,

Whose moving particles have wave disease,

Whose waves have Planck-containing energies,

Whose cats must hope decaying atoms freeze!

This is for you, whose probabilities

Lie drenched in deep dichotomies,

Whose math, all filled with psi's and phi's,

Needs deft, renormalized infinities.

You've toiled for years to reach a certain ease

In digging deep within your QCD's

To calculate the mass, and such, of Z's.

You've mastered these particularities ─

You have upon your wall advanced degrees ─

You have the time to dwell on fantasies ─

What don't you have? The cause of all of these!

 

To you, who're tired of mastering this expertise,

And yearn to find out what's behind these vagaries,

Who've failed to see the forest, studying the trees ―

I offer solace ─ in the realm of E-C-E's!

My particles are defect-cluster entities,

That stretch through space beyond the distant galaxies,

And have, built-in, those waves and spin propensities

Which scholars need, to explicate dualities.

My forces are created by asymmetries ─

I need no vector-particle complexities ─

My mass and energy both correlate with squeeze,

Mere shrinkage zones of higher lattice densities,

And, as for calculating masses, it's a breeze!

So, if you're ripe for elemental verities,

Just read this book ─ but take it slowly, if you please!

 

 

Newton

 

There once was a fellow named Newton,

Whose thinking was quite high-fallutin'!

He worked without pause

To achieve his three laws ─

While his friends spent the plague-years just hootin'!

 

This Newton, whose name was Isaac,

Invented math far from prosaic!

That planets all moved

In ellipses, he proved,

By reasoning quite integraic!

 

When they asked him why apples fell down,

He replied, "To whack you on your crown!

"If an apple fell up,

"You'd have no fruit for sup!"

Now you see why he had great renown.

 

 

Einstein

 

An Einstein named Albert was subtle,

And smiled when he offered rebuttal:

"Don't you know", he would say,

"That the moon's here to stay!

"It won't vanish when you look at Tuttle!"

 

He did his best work in his prime.

His really best work was with time:

"Our time is askew,

"Good for me, bad for you,

"When you rocket away from our clime!"

 

He jousted with Bohr and his clan,

And argued each case with élan ─

Though cleverly pleaded,

He never succeeded

In proving his point to that man!

 

Sources of Inspiration:   Newton stood on the shoulders of Giants.  Einstein contemplat­ed trolley-cars and elevators.  Your author rummaged around in the dustbins of physics, looking under rumpled rugs.

 

Dick

 

There once was a fellow named Dick,

Whose mind was unusually quick ─

But he frittered away

All his talents, they say,

On a theory that made people sick.

 

His idea of Nature was curious ─

She was, to his mind, quite penurious.

"Why opt for more stuff,

"When two bits are enough?

"Any more, and I would have been furious!"

 

He struggled for thirty-five years,

Leaving much of his life in arrears,

But he triumphed at last,

And gave credit, if asked,

"It's because of those physicists' jeers!"

 

If you ask if he had any fun,

He replies, "Of your kind, nearly none!

"But, of course, I had pleasure

"In taking God's measure,

"And seeing how His work was done!"

 

 

Concerning Hard-to-Swallow Concepts of QCD: There are numerous facets of QCD that strain one's credulity, particularly if one has become convinced of the validity of IPP. Yet, one hesitates to confront a QCD believer with blunt facts, because its proponents have made such vast contributions toward our under­standing of the microcosm.  So I have cast my critique in the form of a humorous fantasy, i.e., a teacher attempting to explain QCD to a young person.  Please don't read this if life seem serious to you!

 

QCD FOR TEN-YEAR-OLDS

 

"Everything we see ─ the earth, the air, the stars, we, our­selves, and all the objects around us ─ are composed of only four kinds of things: lepton particles, quark particles, force particles, and

energy particles.  Each of these has a large family:

 

Lepton family -------- 12 members

Quark family --------- 36 members

Force particles ------- 13, at least, needed, many more postulated

Energy particles ----- infinite number

 

"I know this is a big list, but many individuals in the same family are rather similar, so we won't take as long as you might expect to explain all of them!

 

"For example, let's look at the lightest charged member of the lepton family, the electron.  Electrons are tiny, point-like things that spin around like a top, and have a charge like a strange battery with only one end.  Though they seem simple, electrons behave in puz­zling ways. They swirl around the nucleus of atoms all spread out like a cloud of smoke, until something excites them.  Then, they form a larger cloud of smoke, which quickly gives off a particle of light, and becomes a small cloud again.  When electrons go through a small hole, they somehow interfere with themselves, and don't end up where we thought they were going.  When we make them go very fast in those big particle accelerators, they gain so much weight that they get heavier than a large atom!

 

"Quarks, like electrons, are tiny points that spin like a top, and have a charge like a battery with one end, but, even though they are the same size as an electron, quarks weigh from ten to ten-thousand times as much, depending on their "flavor". Another funny thing is that the twelve lightest quarks come in only two sizes, u-quarks, which have a charge like the upper two-thirds of a battery, and d-quarks, which have a charge like the bottom one-third of a battery.  There's a reason why these two quarks have fractional charges:  it makes everything come out right!  Put two u-quarks, and one d-quark together and they make a proton which has a charge like the full plus end of a battery, and if you join together two d-quarks and one u-quark to make a neutron, the charges cancel out, making the neutron like a completely worn out battery with no charge.  All this may sound a little strange, but what is even more astounding is that these fractional charges of the proton's three quarks add to exactly the same amount as the opposite charge of the electron, and the three quark charges of the neutron add to exactly zero.  Who can believe that quarks can divide by three, accurate to seventeen decimal places, or so?  That's really being good at math!

 

"If you've ever tried to hold a bunch of plastic ribbons, you know that they tend to fly off in all directions.  We explain this by saying that they are all charged the same, and like charges repel!  You might wonder why two u-quarks can stay together in a proton;  physicists wondered, too, and finally discovered an answer that is fantastic!  Here it is:

 

"They found that quarks like to juggle!  Three quarks play with three little sticky things called gluons (there are actually eight kinds of these available, but no quark is allowed to play with all of them), which they toss back and forth to each other.  Pretty skillful isn't it.  And, what is even more remarkable, the gluons aren't there until they throw them, and every time one quark throws a gluon, he changes color.  And every time a quark catches a gluon, she changes color.  How do they know what color to change to? 

 

 "Simple!  A gluon is a color messenger, like Western Union!  What happens if the three quarks don't toss and catch their gluons together at the same time, and in the right directions, and what if they grab the wrong color?  You're too young!  You're not ready for that yet!  Anyway, the three quarks are so clever that they can toss and catch gluons all day long, and no matter how many times each changes color, their three colors always, and, at every instant, blend together to make white.  Also, you see, don't you, that if they juggle all the time, they'll have to stay close together?  Now isn't that a simple way to explain why three quarks stay together for ever and ever!  Also, notice that if each quark constantly changes color, and it takes three different colors to make white, as you know from looking closely at the TV picture tube, then you can understand why each quark is really three different quarks!

 

"It would be nice if things had stayed this simple, but physicists made many machines that hurled protons and electrons very vigor­ously at targets, and even at each other, and things got very compli­cated.  They discovered that there were not just three particles, but hundreds of different particles, and for each one of these particles there was one really weird particle that was exactly like the first, only completely opposite, sort of like your photograph compared with the negative that made it.  Physicists call these two groups, real matter, and anti-matter, so we'll just call them REAL and ANTI.

 

"REAL and ANTI particles don't just dislike each other; they hate each other, and whenever they meet, they completely destroy each other!  If a REAL proton, made up of three REAL quarks, meets up with an ANTI proton, made up of three ANTI quarks, you get a big poof, and everything disappears.  Not instantly, because when a REAL quark meets up with an ANTI quark, they don't fight, but join together peaceably to form a meson.  But they really aren't happy together, because they split up very quickly into pure energy, or into REAL AND ANTI leptons, which destroy each other to produce pure energy ─ and a few nothings, called neutrinos, are the only things left to show that the two big particles were once here, and these neutrinos disappear instantly, by zooming away at the speed of light!

 

"When physicists were faced with the problem of explaining why there are so many particles, they saw that they could explain the lighter ones just by assuming that each "flavor" of quark came in three different colors.  Then when heavier particles were discovered, they found that they had to add three more "flavors" of quarks to explain them.     These additional quarks were named s, c, b, and a t-quark was added, because physicists thought quarks should come in two's, just like Noah's animals.  These extra quarks were also good at math, because the s-quark and b-quark has exactly the same charge as the d-quark, while the c-quark and presumably the t-quark has exactly the same charge as the u-quark.   I say, presumably, because the t-quark, though recently discovered, is too new to know what charge it has.

 

"As physicists learned more about the heavy quarks, they dis­covered another way in which quarks are very smart.  Although these heavy quarks weigh a lot more than the u and d, it doesn't take any more effort to stop them from rotating because they all have the same amount of spin.  Imagine, if you will, a group of ice skaters.  Most are slender, but some are extremely fat!  As you watch them, spinning around, you notice that the fat ones are spinning much more slowly than the skinny ones.  You ask them why, and they all speak up at once: "It's our nature!  We all use exactly the same amount of energy to start spinning -- we always have, always will!"

 

"But even  with half a dozen quarks, each in three different colors and in both REAL and ANTI forms, physicists couldn't find enough combinations to explain all the particles they had found; so they speculated that perhaps quarks, like people, get excited, and spin more violently, and make bigger clusters that weigh more.  And they were very gratified to discover that this last idea was all they needed to "quarkify" all the particles which have been discovered.

 

"As you might expect, getting excited is not the same for quarks, as it is for us.  Quarks have to be very careful to speed up their spins only in jumps; they can't rev up like your car engine, but they are, rather, like a car engine that lets you go only 5, 15, 25, 35, ..... mph, or, if your car is a truck, maybe only 1, 3, 5, 7,....mph.  And these speeds have to be exactly scaled, to the particular weight of your vehicle!  Well, we know that quarks really do behave this way, but, in the lab, it is hard to find convincing evidence.  This is because quarks are not only smart -- they are playful!  They like to change from one kind to another, or one spin state to another, so fast, and so often, that the unsuspecting physicists see them as a blur, or a mixture. However, it is easy to find out what is going on.  All the physicist needs to do is to calculate what percentage of the time the quarks are in each of their playful states!

 

"Incidentally, don't try to picture the proton, or neutron, as a solid object.  No matter how they are arranged, three infinitesimal dots will always lie in a single plane, and a single plane can fill no volume, whatsoever!  Yet we know that the three quarks are defi­nitely there, because we can bounce things off of them.  Weird!  It's all very puzzling, so let's return to the lepton particles.

 

"Leptons come in two types, those with no charge, which we will call "Nothings", and those which are fully charged, which we will call "Chargies".  There are six kinds of each type, half being REAL, and half ANTI. 

 

"Nothings are the closest thing to nothing that we know about.  A zillion go through your body every day, and you may think that they should, over time, punch you full of a gazillion holes, but Noth­ings are so small, and you are so full of empty space anyway, that they almost never hit anything at all!  No one has ever seen a Noth­ing, but physicists know that the six kinds of Nothings come in two differ­ent types, three REAL ones, which spiral through you like a left-handed screw, and three ANTI ones, which spiral through you like a right-handed screw ─  or is it the other way around?  I've always been puzzled by these nothings knowing which way to spin, because both REAL & ANTI chargies actually spin both ways!

 

"Chargies don't pal around, like quarks, but always keep their distance -- if they have the same charge.  Those with opposite charges rush quickly towards each other and then simply disap­pear, so I guess they don't like each other, either.

 

"The smallest REAL Chargies, electrons, are always loners, but the two larger Chargies like to pal around with Nothings and smaller Chargies; however, they are very secretive about their relationships, and keep everything well hidden, probably in a pouch like a kangar­oo.  What they carry varies a lot from Chargie to Chargie, but one thing they always carry is a Nothing of their same class.  Of course, a Chargie will never tell you what he is carrying, but, since he is very shy, if you watch him long enough he will simply explode with embarrassment, and thereby reveal his hidden buddies, but this is so hard on the Chargie, he simply disappears!

 

"Take a medium REAL Chargie, for example. When he explodes in a couple millionths of a second, we find that 99 times out of a 100 he was carrying a medium REAL Nothing, a small REAL Chargie, and a small ANTI Nothing.  About one percent of the medium REAL Chargies, however, carry these three things, plus a jagged thing called a gamma.  And although it's a little hard to be sure, we think that some five-percent of the medium REAL Chargies get their signals crossed, and carry a medium ANTI Nothing. and a small REAL Nothing, instead, and we're very angry with them, because they failed to conserve Lepton Number!  This is as bad as not flossing your teeth before retiring!

 

"A big Chargie, called the tau, is about 17 times heavier than a medium Chargie, which is about 200 times heavier than a small Chargie.  Tau's break up in about three ten-trillionths of a second, and are full of surprises!  In addition to the big REAL Nothing that all big REAL Chargies carry, some carry a small REAL Chargie and a small ANTI Nothing; others carry a medium REAL Chargie and a medium ANTI Nothing. Yet, two-thirds of the time we find they're carrying something completely different, groups of REAL quarks and ANTI quarks, and these can be in several dozen different mixtures.  The tau is definitely not as smart as a quark, because it doesn't even seem to know what family it belongs to!

 

"From what we've already discussed, you probably think that quarks are very talented, but they can do much more!  For example, while they're juggling gluons, they are also manufacturing, throwing out, and catching all the other kinds of "force particles".  They throw out and catch virtual photons, which are not to be confused with real photons, but which, instead, cause other quarks, and leptons, to be attracted to them, or repelled, depending, I guess, on the sort of message the Western Union guy delivers.  And, of course, leptons have the ability to reciprocate these attentions.