A VISUALIZABLE REPRESENTATION OF THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

Abstract

Rudimentary knots are invoked to generate a representation of the elementary particles, a model that endows the particles with visualizable structure. The model correlates with the basic tenets, taxonomy, and interactions of the Standard Model, but goes beyond it in a number of important ways, the most significant being that all particles (hadrons and leptons, fermions and bosons) and interactions share a common topology. Among other consequences of the modeling are the topological basis for isospin invariance and its connection to electric charge, the necessary identity of electron and proton charge magnitudes, and the existence of precisely three generations on the particle family tree. The salient feature of the model is that the elementary particles are viewed not as discrete, point-like objects in a vacuum but rather as sustainable, membrane-like distortions embodying curvature and torsion in and of an otherwise featureless continuum and that their manifest physical attributes correlate with the distortion. There are additional connections to the theories of fiber bundles, superstrings and instantons and, historically, to the work of Kelvin in the mid-nineteenth century and Cartan in the 1920s among others.