The ancient Greeks already had the idea that the diversity of phenomena in the world could be traced back to indivisible atoms, the combination of which makes up the various substances in our everyday world. Indeed, chemists in the 18th and 19th centuries were able to trace all substances back to 92 different types of atoms. However, it turned out that atoms are not really indivisible but are made up of even smaller components, the electrons in the atomic shell and the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus, each of which is made up of three quarks.
In addition to these elementary particles, which are directly involved in the material structure of the world, physicists today acknowledge a whole range of other elementary particles which, according to current knowledge, are not made up of even smaller constituents. The current Standard Model of particle physics includes 61 different elementary particles.
A zoo of 61 elementary particles is pretty big. When the Greeks came up with the idea that the abundance of different materials could be traced back to combinations of an 'indivisible one', they certainly didn't think there were 61 basic building blocks. They were probably thinking of a single basic building block, or at most a single-digit number of basic building blocks.
Today's standard model with 61 different elementary particles therefore calls for a simplification. The experimental fact that the known elementary particles of the standard model can transform into one another suggests that they are different manifestations or combinations of a universal elementary particle. There is further evidence in favour of this hypothesis: all elementary particles have an electric charge that corresponds to the charge of the electron up to a factor of 0, ±⅓, ±⅔ or ±1. The fact that the values of the electrical charges of all known elementary particles are in the ratio of small integers to each other suggests that they are not a pure product of chance, but that the same mechanism is active in all elementary particles, which generates the electrical charge and determines the charge value of the respective elementary particle.
Regarding electric charges, there are other peculiarities:
- The electric charge can have two different signs (+ or -).
- Each particle has an antiparticle whose electric charge has the opposite sign.
- Quarks and leptons occur in two lines, and the electric charge of two sister particles differs by a whole elementary charge e (electron: -e / neutrino: 0; down quark: -⅓e / up quark: +⅔e).
- Only particles and antiparticles that do not carry a whole-numbered electric charge are subject to the strong interaction.
48 of the Standard Model particles are so-called fermions, which are characterised by the fact that they all have an internal angular momentum with a value of h/4π, where h = 6.64*10-34 J*s is Planck's action quantum and π = 3.1415... is the circular number. This angular momentum, also known as spin, must be associated with a rotational energy and a rotational period. Since, according to Einstein's relation E = mc2, mass and energy are equivalent, the rotational energy of the spin must be associated with a mass. In fact, from the well-known energy equation for photons E = h * f via the relation h * f = h * τ-1 = h/2π * 2π/τ = L * ω, we also obtain for all other bosons E = L * ω = h/2π * 2π/τ = mc2 and also for fermions E = L * ω = h/4π * 4π/τ = mc2, using the de Broglie relation τ = h / E = h / mc2. This gives a very simple explanation for the mass at rest of the particles, which does not require the complicated Higgs mechanism, which is currently generally accepted as the cause of mass at rest. If the 48 fermions also differ in terms of their moment of inertia, their rotational energy and rotational periods would be different despite having identical internal angular momentum. Of the 48 fermions, all corresponding particles and antiparticles are known to have identical masses at rest, and the three colour variants of each quark particle do not differ in mass at rest. In total, the fermions have twelve different masses at rest, which could be caused by different moments of inertia of the particles in question.
At this point we would like to put forward the bold hypothesis that all 48 known fermions can be traced back to a single universal particle, which can assume different configurations, from which the different electrical charges and the different moments of inertia (and thus masses at rest) result.
Twelve other particles of the Standard Model - the particles of the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions - have an internal angular momentum twice that of the fermions. This suggests that they are each made up of two of the hypothetical universal particles. The experimental fact that photons, W bosons and Z bosons can each decay into two fermions also points in this direction. If the bosons with internal angular momentum h/2π are indeed made up of two universal particles, there must be a mechanism that holds them together. Such a mechanism would have to have a very short range, otherwise no violent collisions of fermions would be necessary to create the bosons. Perhaps the 61st particle of the Standard Model, which was discovered at the CERN particle accelerator in 2012 and has so far been attributed to the Higgs mechanism, plays a role in this hitherto unknown mechanism.
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