Research Interests and Activities

Finally, I include some personal memories about the history of the microscopic model:
The ground laying idea actually started as early as 1987. When I visited Fermilab that summer, I was accompanied by my wife and our son half a year old. We stayed for a month and were given the opportunity to live in one of the traditional houses on the Fermilab property. We did it with ease to bring the fire brigade to the scene on one of the first days.

At that time there were the `preon models' - assuming quarks and leptons to be composed of smaller constituents - and the community had just agreed that such models cannot be built in a natural and consistent manner, most of all because of the extreme difference between the pointlikeness and necessarily high masses of the constituents and the relatively small masses of most quarks and leptons. I had followed the ansatz with curious interest, but not written any paper on the subject, feeling that this kind of approach was missing some essential ingredient.

Anyhow my main work was on QCD and my task at Fermilab was to discuss properties of hadron jets with someone from the lab staff. We had some interesting conversations, but when it came to filling a permanent scientific position the other year, I got away empty handed, as in all other institutions where I ever introduced myself.

The colleague had time only in the afternoons, so in the mornings I felt free to try to invent some ideas about the underlying nature of the quark lepton multiplet structure. There are so many reliable experimental results in that area that I thought quark and lepton properties to be a good starting point in order to develop a really fundamental theory. I further thought that if anything is of importance at all in this world of shadows, it is not logics or biology, not money or the rules of societies, but the deep structure of the physical universe.

I did not want to follow the mainstream SUSY, GUTs, Strings etc. These models emphasize symmetry (which is important, no question) but do not place enough value on a possible real material background, on which in my opinion any symmetry structure having to do with matter has to rely. I wanted to take this into account, when starting to develop a unified theory of my own. Since I had made elaborate studies in natural philosophy, I thought that I could do better.

In reality, my considerations did not start with such high demands. I set my sights lower and tried to get forward step by step. So actually, during my Fermilab stay I did not come up with final answers. I just made some observations which were to become important in later years. Namely, I noticed that the total of 24 quarks and leptons had some structural similarity to the ordering of the 24 group elements of the tetrahedral point group. Could be an accident, but I scanned many possibilities and did not find better answers.

Since as a young student I had some interest in theoretical chemistry, I began to restudy some textbooks on the tetrahedral point group with the idea in mind that tetrahedrons could supply a quark lepton substructure in a somehow more consistent manner than preon models do. It was only much later, in the new millenium, that I began to consider physical space to be made up of a discrete tetrahedral isospin arrangement and the observed `elementary particles' as excitations thereon.

The tetrahedral point group stayed in my head for a while, before I decided to publish, at least as a preprint, in 1998. Shortly afterwards I left scientific research because I did not find a permanent position. For a while I was frustrated and avoided all physics topics. It was only another 10 years later and after writing a novel of about 1000 pages, dealing with the side issues of life, that I returned to the problem, now as a private scholar and at first in a rather playful manner.

The first main problem I encountered was that the representation spaces of the tetrahedral group do not match the quark lepton multiplet structure exactly. In 2012 I realized that one of the tetrahedral black-and-white point groups when taken over from spin to isospin space does a better job. Accordingly, I introduced a tetrahedron of isospin vectors, and considered their interaction as a sort of `isomagnetism'. Quarks and leptons were then interpreted as vibrations of the isospin vectors. I noticed quite soon that there naturally arise 3 massless modes (interpreted as neutrinos) whose masselessness can be attributed to the conservation of isospin. I furthermore realized that (in contrast to an ordinary tetrahedron) a tetrahedron of pseudovectors is chiral, and that this can be used to explain the parity violation of the weak interacation.

In 2013 I united physical and isospin space to a larger 6-dimensional space, with a corresponding 6+1 dimensional spacetime continuum and began to understand the SM Higgs mechanism as an alignment of isospin vectors in that space. This requires that each point of 3-dimensional physical space actually is a tetrahedron, not extending into physical space but into the 3 extra dimensions. In other words, our universe is an invisible elastic substrate, microscopically formed by aligned isospin tetrahedrons. The tetrahedrons consists of tetrons transforming and making up the backbone of our universe. Furthermore, the transformations in isospin space are not just abstract symmetry operations but corresonds to real rotations in 3 extra dimensions. and the SM SSB is obtained as an `isomagnetic' symmetry breaking where isospin vectors form tetrahedrons which are aligned thus breaking the original isospin SU(2) symmetry.

I solved in passing another problem I always have had with particle physics philosophy. How does electron on one side of the universe know that it should behave the same way as an electron on the other side? How can all the information about the SM SSB buried in objects as light as neutrinos?

Also the vast difference beween the Planck and the Fermi scale (known as the hierarchy problem) becomes understandable within the tetron theory.