About the Author:
Jay R. Yablon
Several folks who
have come to this Web Site have requested more information about my own
background. I have decided to accede to
those requests.
I was an
undergraduate at MIT (class of 1976) and double-majored in computer science and
political science, with a strong minor in physics. I then went to law
school and became a patent attorney. Professionally, I write and
prosecute patent applications for inventors in a wide range of physical,
mechanical, electrical, optical, and computer arts. But I have always had a passionate interest
in physics, from the standpoint of understanding the intelligence and order
which animates our universe.
From 1976 to 1986, I spent almost all of my spare time learning particle physics and relativity as an independent research project, seeking to solve two fundamental problems: 1) understanding why the Fermions have the masses they have (per the anecdote below) and 2) finding a unification of all four interactions, which is no small project.
During that ten year period, I developed many "tools" toward addressing each of these two problems, but could never quite put all the pieces together. From 1986 till late-2004, I did no physics at all. With my wife of 28 years, we raised two children who have matured to fine young adults, and I built from scratch my patent practice which is now very successful and has helped me become reasonably-independent. I actually had no expectation or idea that I would ever return to physics work.
Late in 2004,
however, I found myself compelled to return to the physics work I had done 20
years earlier, with a lot more maturity and perspective than I had back in the
1970 and 1980s. All of the pieces that I had developed from 1976 to 1986
started coming together for me. I felt
that I had the opportunity to study physics intensively for ten years with an
eye toward solving the mass problem and unifying the four interactions, then
“sleeping on it” for 18 years, and then coming back to everything with a wholly
fresh perspective.
The paper on Fermion Mass
Revelation in Electroweak Interactions captures my ongoing efforts to
characterize the Fermion masses from theoretical principles. For all the importance of “experimental
validation,” the Fermion masses are experimental data crying out for a
theoretical foundation, yet to date, we have no such foundation. This paper seeks to lay the foundation to
remedy this glaring omission in our understanding of nature.
The paper on Electrodynamics
and the Spacetime Vacuum; and Could the Quarks
Actually Be Magnetic Monopoles?, however, is nearest and dearest to me,
and I will take the liberty to talk more about this work here in the hope that
you will choose to read what I have to say.
This paper captures
10 years of work, 18 years of reflection, and several recent months of new work
on the question of grand unification. I
respectfully submit, in all humility, that this paper contains what
Dr. Einstein was looking for in his later years, but we just didn't have
the scientific data at the time that he would have needed to complete
this work. The closest he came was in his paper on Relativistic Theory
of the Non-Symmetric Field with the “surprising” finding “that the gravitational
equations for empty space determine their field just as strongly as do
Maxwell’s [source-free] equations in the case of the electromagnetic
field.” With this statement, Dr. Einstein was leaving some very
important clues in this paper to the next generation of scientists. I believe he wanted to say that Maxwell
equations are the gravitational equations for empty space, but did not
feel he could fully support that statement and so the measure of field strength
was as far as he got.
It is dismaying to
me that Relativistic Theory of the Non-Symmetric Field and the clues
about unification which it contains has these days
largely been dismissed, along with Reinich and
Wheeler's geometrodynamic program. I believed these were all right on
target. I am very conservative as a
physicist, which is to say that I believe that in order to explain nature, one
should squeeze every possible bit of physics out of the classical theories
which have proven themselves over time, before introducing brand new concepts
which may turn out (and often turn out) to be unnecessary. Thus, in the same way that the Fermion
Mass paper can really be thought of as “How to Stretch the Electroweak
Standard Model, with Nothing Else, as Far as Possible to Reveal the Lepton
Masses,” the Classical
Electrodynamics paper can be thought of as “How to Stretch only Einstein’s
Gravitation and Maxwell’s Electrodynamics to Unify All of Nature’s
Interactions.” Which
is to say, I believe, from a very conservative viewpoint, that there is still
some very significant untapped potential in these two classical theories (and
in the Electroweak Standard Model) that is being widely-overlooked.
The first part of
this paper – recognizing that Maxwell’s equations can be expressed simply as the
vacuum equation Ruv=0 – is something I
already discovered back in 1984, after studying Reinich
and Wheeler in great detail (my original, never-published paper is in the US
Copyright Office, dated 1984, but you may copy it if you wish). I have posted a PDF scan of that 1984 paper
on the page with the classical electrodynamics paper, which you can link to here as well. (Chapter
6 has the detailed “field strength” calculation based on Einstein, which is
merely summarized in one paragraph in the 2004-2005 paper.) The problem was that this identity of
Maxwell’s equations with Ruv=0 only works
if there exist non-zero monopole sources, as well as third rank antisymmetric
sources which I already had “predicted” in 1984, but for which I had no ready
physical explanation. In short, back in
1984, the Ruv=0 expression of Maxwell’s
electrodynamics predicted certain objects, including magnetic monopoles, for
which I was unable to offer a physical explanation. I had the mathematics to unify classical
electromagnetism with gravitation, but I could not explain the physics. And so, the theory sat.
In late 2004, I
returned to this work, and decided that a concerted effort needed to be applied
to answer the question "where are the magnetic monopoles”? By then, I of course recognized fully that
Maxwell’s classical electromagnetism needed to be regarded as a U(1) subset of electroweak theory, and that the overall work
needed to be considered in the context of non-Abelian field theory. On December 1, 2004, I came upon the key
insight that if one regards the strong interaction gluon fields as the Maxwell
“duals” of (a not-presently-known superset of) the SU(2)xU(1) electroweak flavor
fields, that the magnetic monopoles
immediately become identified with point sources of color, i.e., the quarks. This solved two long-standing problems all at
once: how to interpret the dual fields which previously had no physical
explanation (they are gluon fields), and why don’t we observe free magnetic
monopoles (because they are color charges a.k.a. quarks and we don’t observe
free quarks either).
Over the next
couple of months, I also came to gradually realize that the mysterious
antisymmetric third-rank sources I had uncovered 20 years ago seem to describe
tri-colored “baryons,” in integral form over three quark-pair
interactions. What is truly fascinating
about this is that even if we did not yet
know about baryons containing three quarks, the three terms in Maxwell’s third-rank
monopole equations, when calculated through in the context of non-abelian field
theory where they don’t zero out, would lead us to find that each baryon is an
integral sum over three pairwise, point source,
interactions, i.e., that each baryon is a “non-point” object of some spatial
extent containing three confined ”point” sources. Thus, as a good example of the “untapped
potential” in Maxwell’s electrodynamics, this means that Maxwell’s equations (written as two tensor equations in spacetime)
actually “predict” baryons as we now know them today, but these were set to
zero because Maxwell was working only with Abelian fields.
Thus, classical gravitation is unified with classical electromagnetism under the umbrella of Ruv=0, and this unification predicts certain “sources” which can only be understood by using non-Abelian fields which in turn lead to colored quarks and baryons and a further unification encompassing electroweak and strong interactions. By carrying the unification of gravitation and electromagnetism to its logical conclusion and trying to understand the sources arising from this unification, we are compelled to include quantum electroweak and QCD strong interactions also.
This approach obviates the need to unify the electroweak and
strong interactions as parallel groups (i.e., with some mega group encompassing
SU(3)xSU(2)XU(1)), or with
extra spacetime dimensions, because it is instead based on G(Flavor) 
G(Color), or in
duality terms, simply G *G. Nature, simply put, is vacuum geometry plus
quantum topology, with internal flavor and color. (No strings attached.)
I will always recall a particular moment during high school chemistry class, quite a few years ago, when the teacher told us that the proton mass was about 1860 times as great as the electron mass. I naturally asked why this was so, and was surprised to find out that nobody really knew the answer. At that moment, I took up the challenge of trying to understand why the elementary particles have the masses that they have.
Fermion Mass Revelation in Electroweak Interactions is an important milestone in this effort. I appreciate any comments and suggestions you may be able to offer about this work.
Very truly yours,
Jay R. Yablon