The ABC Preon Model. Comparison to the Competition.

This is the seventeenth thread (of a planned 18) in the series on the ABC Preon Model. Links to earlier threads will appear in the comment below.

In this thread, we'll compare the ABC Preon Model to its competition.

Preon models have been around since at least 1974 which is the date of publication of a paper by Pati and Salam that proposed a substructure to quarks and leptons. A book on preon theories was published in 1992 by D'Souza and Kalman, and I would refer you to that book as a good place to read about preon history.

There are, of course, many, many theories of elementary particles that have been put forth by individuals over the past several decades. It is really quite a cottage industry. As a reviewer for Physics Essays, I saw many such efforts. The vast majority are dismissed as the works of cranks and crackpots, and for the vast majority that it is a fair judgement. Most of these works have a common theme. They generally start out with some ill defined concepts that the author feels are quite profound. The ill defined concepts are then infinitely malleable so that an exact calculation of the mass of every known particle can be obtained to the limit available on the author's calculational device. Almost without exception, these efforts to explain nature yield no new predictions for results not yet known, and the author will even claim to be able to explain anything new once it has occurred. It is this large number of crackpot efforts that makes it very difficult to get any new radical idea heard, since scientists generally (and often correctly) reject any such idea quickly once it sounds sufficiently different than the Standard Model.

And yet the primary competition to any preon model is the Standard Model itself, which in fact suffers to some degree from many of the same flaws as do the crackpot efforts. The Standard Model has a very large number of arbitrary inputs, and has been modified over time whenever a new result was discovered that was outside of its original bounds. But while the Standard Model does commit the same kind of sins as the crackpot efforts, there is a large difference in scope. The Standard Model has been modified relatively rarely, and does not need a modification for each and every new experimental result. And the Standard Model has predicted some phenomena before they were discovered. So while the Standard Model does have its issues, any true judgement must be that it is far superior to the vast majority of its competition.

This series of threads has presented an overview of the ABC Preon Model. While it is in its early stages of development, and while it has some opportunities for improvement, there are many philosophical advantages that the ABC Preon Model has that will now be emphasized.

The first advantage is that the ABC Preon Model dovetails nicely into the Standard Model as a means to explain the various particles and forces known to exist. The ABC Preon Model is, after all, a preon model. This means that it proposes the existence of a smaller number of new particles that can be used to construct the known, existing ones. Quarks are understood to be quantum states of a C preon bound to either an A or a B preon, while leptons are understood to be quantum states of an anti-A preon bound to a B preon. Hence, the vast majority of the Standard Model success can be transferred into the ABC Preon Model. Leptons still exist, and quarks can still be used as handy names for the categorization of more complicated hadrons.

Another advantage of the ABC Preon Model is simplicity, as the 36 quarks and 12 leptons of the standard model have been replaced by the 6 ABC preon particles. Historically, the finding of such simplicity generally leads to advancement in our knowledge about our universe.

The next significant philosophical advance of the ABC Preon Model is that it reduces the number of forces understood to exist in nature. Gravity and electromagnetism remain unchanged as one goes from the Standard Model to the ABC Preon model. A force proposed to be carried by the neutrino is postulated to be the force that binds preons into leptons and also binds preons into hadrons. But the weak force has been identified not as a force, but rather as another of nature's examples of quantum tunneling.

In addition to the advantage of reducing the number of forces, the elimination of the weak force is further advantageous in that it restores the attribute of direction to all known forces. In the Standard Model the weak force does not have a direction, while the other forces do. In the ABC Preon Model all forces have direction.

Low energy weak interactions are governed by a process mediated by the masses of the weak bosons in standard theory. In the ABC Preon Model those mass relations are again seen to come into play during the quantum tunneling of the preons, as the virtual mass of the tunneled states are similar to the masses of the theorized weak bosons.

Another advantage is that the ABC Preon Model allows for an entire quantum number, color, to be set aside. Of course the new "neutrinic charge" has been added to the discussion, but by eliminating color, one can also eliminate the eight gluons from the mix of elementary particles.

A further advantage of the ABC Preon Model is that hadronic matter and leptonic matter are each now seen to be made up from the same preonic material, rather than having a disjoint set of constituents as is the case for the Standard Model's description of how particles are constructed.

Importantly, the ABC Preon Model leads to a clear understanding as to why nature has several generations of particles that are otherwise identical. We have seen that the massive leptons are each various excited states of the same basic bound preon structure, while the various quark flavors are simply various excited states of basic bound preon structures as well.

Also, it is important to note that the elementary particles predicted by the ABC Preon Model can, in principle, be isolated, whereas the quarks of the Standard Model cannot be. In fact, when looked at through the ABC Preon Model we can see that the A, B, and C preons have already been isolated, as that is what happened when the W, Z and top particles were discovered.

Lastly, the ABC Preon Model has predictive power. In thread 15 it is shown how the ABC Preon Model predicts several new experimental results for future high energy physics experiments. This can be done, despite the lack of an underlying dynamical theory, from the simple realization that free preons of known masses are being formed in high energy collisions. Recall from thread 15 that there are a total of 18 predictions and of those, nine are already seen or expected. (Z pairs, W pairs, WZ events are seen or expected. The W, Z, top and Higgs events and two independent deep inelastic scattering ratios have been seen.) The ABC Preon Model fits 8 of those 9 events nearly perfectly, and the ninth - the Higgs Mass - is fit to within three and a half standard deviations of measurement. All these fits to the data are done with only three free parameters (the A, B and C masses). This quantitative evidence, coupled with the qualitative evidence discussed above, lends credence to the proposition that the ABC Preon Model is a correct model for what makes up our world.

The Exposition of the ABC Preon Model will involve many threads. Here are links to previous threads in this series, in the order that they appeared:

1. The ABC Preon Model, Background: the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics

2. The ABC Preon Model. Modeling the Massive Leptons.

3. The ABC Preon Model. Assigning Some Quantum Numbers.

4. The ABC Preon Model. Modeling the Hadrons.

5. The ABC Preon Model. Quarks.

6. The ABC Preon Model. Relationship to the Standard Model.

7. The ABC Preon Model. Neutrinos.

8. The ABC Preon Model. Weak Decays.

9. The ABC Preon Model. The W and Z. A and B masses. First Free Preons.

10. The ABC Preon Model. Physics in Electron Positron Colliders. A Prediction.

11. The ABC Preon Model. Deep Inelastic Scattering. The C Mass.

12. ABC Preon Model. Not the Top Quark. Preons.

13. Higgs Boson (Actually Free Preon) Decay Channels.

14. The ABC Preon Model. Prediction for the Higgs Mass.

15. The ABC Preon Model. More Predictions.

16. The ABC Preon Model. A Needed Improvement.

Good thread, as usual!

In multiple posts you have said the weak force does not have a direction, but that's completely wrong. Yet you still accept that electromagnetism has a direction? The weak and electromagnetic force is exactly the same except that weak force carriers have mass.

*Bump*

Ouch, I think I hit my head.

The weak and electromagnetic force is exactly the same except that weak force carriers have mass.

Um, not quite the same. The Weak Force is kind of short range. Extremely short range, in fact.

originally posted by: swanne
Good thread, as usual!

Thanks for the support.

Monday I plan to put together a thread that contains everything in one place as well as a conclusion and that should wrap up this series.

originally posted by: Quaria
In multiple posts you have said the weak force does not have a direction, but that's completely wrong. Yet you still accept that electromagnetism has a direction? The weak and electromagnetic force is exactly the same except that weak force carriers have mass.

Electromagnetism obeys the Lorentz force law, which is a vector force law that has direction. Sometimes it is attractive (opposite electric charges attract) and sometimes repulsive (like charges repel) and when it comes to the magnetic force things get rather complicated but it still has a direction (charge times the cross product of the velocity with the magnetic field). Gravity has direction as it always attracts. The strong force has a direction as it is also attractive.

In the case of neutron decay and other weak decays, the weak force just "mediates" the process of the decay. There is no direction involved in that process.

Now if you look at Feynman diagrams I will grant you that there is some similarity between the Weak bosons and photons. But please recall that the Feynman diagrams were invented as calculational tools and weren't originally meant to be taken literally.

a reply to: delbertlarson

This reminds me of that time I was in a debate with one of the physicists around here. My own preon model suggests that the antineutrino triggers beta decay instead of being a result of it. Of course, my opponent said that the antineutrino was the result of beta decay.

In the end, we had to call it a draw. There was no way to be sure of the direction of the W boson, as both scenarios were mathematically equivalent.