Dear Wayne,
What a fascinating essay! I was surprised at how short it was in page count, since you cover a lot of turf. I was also very pleased to see an essay that addresses quarks, the strong force, and neutrinos, since without those other non-electrons it's hard to see how one can make serious inroads into the issue of where fermions come from. Arguably, the far messier and more complicated interactions of quarks are more likely to be telling us something important about fermions in general than are the clean, largely unencumbered (unconfined!) electrons in isolation.
Yes, I am very familiar with the rishon model and its delightfully named pair of preons, the vohu ("void", V, with no electric charge) and the tohu ("unformed" ,T, or mnemonically one "Third" of an electron charge). It was the starting point for some of my most intriguing personal research, even though the original rishon model flatly does not work. What Harari and Shupe glommed onto there was an underlying symmetry that they unfortunately tried to translate directly into still more particles, when the message was really a bit subtler than that.
My familiarity with where rishons went wrong is why I found this paragraph of your essay especially fascinating. It also made me pay much closer attention to what you are saying in your entire essay:
Essay page 1: "The T & V (Rishon[s]) geometric basis doesn't include curvature, which is constructed when three [T & V preons] are taken as a group, e.g. quark. Geometric intuition suggests that they are 'fused', as partitions of a closed string, band, etc. ... QCD color is determined by the orientation of the intrinsic spin centerline with respect to the colored partitions, Up or Down quanta by the number of T (or V) partition/preons, and Electro-dynamic charge is assigned as usual."
Uh, WOW!
You are dead right that the original Harari "straight string" of three preons, e.g. TTT for the positron, {VTT, TVT, and TTV} for the three colors of up quarks, {TVV, VTV, VVT} for anti-down quarks and anti-colors, and VVV for neutrinos, fails literally at the geometric level because it "distinguishes" both the start and end quarks and the order in which they are connected. The only geometric resolution that makes sense is exactly what you drew in your figure: A loop of three rishons that is bowed in outward (either up or down) around its axis of symmetry.
After that , I started reading what you are saying a lot more carefully. To be, um, a bit blunt about it, you're writing style is so informal and, well... "syntactically random" maybe?... that it's too asy to skim over what you are saying about physics.
But here's the deal: Out of the hundreds or thousands of folks who have looked at the rishon model seriously over the past few decades, to the best of my knowledge you are only person (OK OK, other than myself) who noticed this absolutely critical geometry issue. It's literally foundational in the sense that if you don't notice it, you are instantly and from there on guaranteed that no theory built on T and V can ever be internally self-consistent, despite all of its promising relationships that rishon triplets have to the fermions. I am pretty sure that folks not noticing this deep problem is at least one of the reasons why the rishon idea never really got out of the starting gate.
You are a very clever man, Wayne. You hide it a bit behind a highly informal and somewhat syntactically random style of speaking, but some of your insights are deep and frankly profound. If early in rishon history Harari or Shupe had figured out what you just said, I suspect that some of the major threads in the history of particle unification theory would have played out very differently by now.
Another important issue that you identified was this one:
Essay page 2: "The proposed [rishon loop] approach to particle theory bears a striking geometric similarity to string theory."
Now on this one I'll go out on a bit of limb and suggest to you that the reason for this resemblance is that you are looking at the real, experimentally accessible prequel to string theory.
Most folks aren't aware of it, but nucleons like protons and neutrons have additional spin states that appear like heavier particles built from the same set of quarks. Thus in addition to uud forming a spin 1/2 proton, the same three quarks can also form a heavier particle with spin 3/2 (1 added unit of spin) and spin 5/2 (2 added units of spin). These three variations form a lovely straight line when plotted as mass versus spin, which in turn implies a fascinatingly regular relationship between mass and nucleon spin.
These lines are called Regge trajectories, and back in the late 1960s and early 1970s they looked like a promising hint for how to unify the particle zoo. Analyses of Regge trajectories indicated string-like stable resonance states were creating the extreme regularity of the Regge trajectories. These "strings" consisted of something very real, the strong force, and their vibrations were highly constrained by something equally real, the quarks that composed the nucleons (and also mesons, which also have Regge trajectories). These boson-like resonances of a string-like incarnation of the strong force were highly unexpected, extremely interesting, and experimentally accessible. Theorists were optimistic.
Then it all went to Planck.
Specifically, the following paper caught on like wildfire (slow wildfire !) and ended up obliterating any hope or future funding for understanding the quite real, experimentally accessible, proton-scale, strong-force-based string vibrations behind Regge trajectories. They did this by proposing what I like to call the Deep Dive:
Scherk, J. & Schwarz, J. H., Dual Models for Non-Hadrons, Nuclear Physics B, Elsevier, 1974, 81, 118-144.
So what was the Deep Dive, and why did they do it?
Well, it "went down" like this: Scherk and Schwarz noticed that the overall signature of some of the proton-sized strong-force vibrations behind Regge trajectories were very similar to the spin 2 signatures of the (still) hypothetical gravitons that were supposed to unify gravity with other three forces of the Standard Model. Since the emerging Standard Model was having breathtaking success in that time period for explaining the particle zoo, quantum gravity and the Planck-scale foam were very popular at the time... and very tempting.
So, based as best I can tell only on the resemblance of these very real vibration modes in baryons and mesons to gravitons, Scherk and Schwarz made their rather astonishing, revelation-like leap: They decided that the strong-force-based vibrations behind Regge trajectories were in fact gravitons, which have nothing to do with the strong force and are most certainly not "composed" of the strong force. The Planck-scale vibrations of string theory are instead composed of... well, I don't know what, maybe intense gravity? I've never been able to get an answer out of a string theorist on that question of "what is a string made of?" This is not an unfair question, since for example the original strings behind Regge trajectories are "composed" of the strong force, and have quite real energies associated with their existences.
I still don't even quite get even the logic behind the Deep Dive, since gravity had exactly zero to do with either the substance of the strings (a known force) or the nature of the skip-rope-like, quark-constrained vibrations behind Regge trajectories. Nonetheless they did it. They took the Deep Dive, and it only ended up costing physics the following:
... 20 orders of magnitude of and shrinking size, since protons are about 10-15 meters across, and the gravitons were nominally at the Planck foam scale of 10-35 (!!!), which is a size scale that is inaccessible to any conceivable direct measurement process in the universe; plus:
... 20 orders of magnitude of increased energy costs, which is similarly universally inaccessible to any form of direct measurement; plus:
... a complete liberation from all of those annoying but experimentally validated vibration constraints that were imposed in real nucleons and mesons by the presence of quarks and the strong force. That's a cost, not a benefit, since it explodes the range of options that have to be explored to find a workable theory. Freeing the strings from... well... any appreciable experimental or theoretical constraints... enabled them instead to take on the nearly infinite number of possible vibration modes that a length or loop of rope gyrating wildly in outer space would have; and finally:
... just to add yet a few more gazillion unneeded and previously unavailable degrees of freedom, a huge increase in the number of available spatial dimensions, always at least 9 and often many more.
And they wonder why string theory has 10500 versions of the vacuum... :)
Oh... did I also mention that the Deep Dive has cost the US (mainly NSF plus matching funds from other institutions) well over half a billion dollars, with literally not a single new experimental outcome, let alone any actual working new process or product, as a consequence?
This was only to be expected, since the Deep Dive plunged all research into real string-like vibrations down into the utterly inaccessible level of the Planck foam. Consequently, the only product of string theory research has been papers. This half a billion dollars' worth of papers has built on itself, layer by layer of backward citations and references, for over 40 years. In many cases, the layers of equations are now so deep that no human mind could possibly verify them. Errors only amplify over time, and if there is no way to stop their propagation by catching them though experiments, it's the same situation as trying to write an entire computer operating system in one shot, without having previously executed and validated its individual components.
In short, what the US really got for its half billion dollars was a really deep stack of very bad programming. Our best hope for some eventual real return on string theory investments is that at least a few researchers were able to get in some real, experimentally meaningful research in all of that, to produce some real products that don't depend on unverifiable non-realities.
So Wayne, here is real my point:
It is not accurate to say that your loop rishons ideas resembles string theory, because what you just proposed is almost certainly both real and experimentally accessible, and string theory is not.
Thus the correct statement is that string theory somewhat vaguely resembles your work on rishon string loops. I'll give the string theory body of work credit for that much, even if it is a lot shabbier in quality.
In other words, your 2017 FQXi essay very likely has more experimentally meaningful real value than all that pile of string theory papers that all those US government agencies have invested in for over 40 years. (DoD did not participate, nanny-nanny boo-boo NSF!).
And you accomplished all of this for... a lot less than half a billion dollars!... :)
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
P.S. - Sorry, but the FQXi rating that I'm giving your essay as a submission to the 2017 FQXi Essay contest is not all that high. That's because your essay is: structurally and syntactically a bit of a mess; stuffed to the gills with way too many ideas introduced in way too short of a space; and not even pretending to answer the real FQXi question this year, which is to explain what the word 'fundamental' really means. That said, I also think every serious particle theorist should at least look over and read your essay. While some of the content of your essay is very likely nonsense (sorry, but that is pretty much true for everyone writing papers in an exploratory area like this), you are also almost frighteningly spot-on for at least some issues. That makes your essay very much worth reading and taking seriously, contest aside.
