Matters of Gravity

Episode #21

Despite extreme happiness, a certain sense of ennui set in upon Roger. He had always doubted whether happiness could ever be an end in itself and whether biological comfort had any meaning aside from its own justification. He had never formulated the idea, but he had had inclinations toward it even as a child growing up surrounded by happiness. Awaken in the middle of the night by some such meaning-of-life apprehension – certainly not a panic attack, a feeling he had only heard about but acknowledged having never felt – his thoughts wondered off onto aspects of his life other than his physical awareness of the warm wonderful body lying there beside him breathing rhythmically which seemed to be Maria's version of snoring.

Her association with 'lepton wars' occurred to him and thus to their discussion of a more logical explanation of why fermions were so exclusive. Why shouldn't down quarks be able to share the same energy level. Pauli's exclusion principle, that certainly accounted for the shell structure of electrons in atoms, seemed to him to be held more as a belief than as a demonstrated consequence of what else is known of quarks. Acquiescence without remonstrance to simplistic analogies and explanations of behavior of other particles seemed all wrong to Roger no matter what Julie happened to believe on the matter. Why had he given in so easily to Julie's dismissal of his objections? What was her explanation? She had never presented what could be considered a cause. It was just what had been accepted by the 'community'.

As he recalled the very few days of discussion with Julie he realized now that most of the issues he had raised in their supposed assault on gravitation had more to do with particle physics than gravitation or electrostatics. Julie had just wanted to get on with an effort to redefine the basis of gravitation, not particle physics. It had irritated her that he had insisted upon discussing a quark basis of the charge distribution that he thought would ultimately be the foundation for a new theory of gravity. Maria was the one whose primary interest had been the standard model of particle physics, whose background provided full knowledge of fermions, the group of particles to which quarks as well as electrons belong. It is after all fermions for which the Pauli exclusion principle applies. The lepton aspect of electrons was another matter. And it was she, Maria, with whom the truce in the 'lepton war' had figuratively been signed. A renewal of the conflict was inevitable.

He wondered to himself now about what could be responsible for the well-known non-associative behavior of fermions. Certainly 'spin' was involved, so it seemed to come down to how a spinning distribution of electrical charge differs from a stationary one. Could spin itself produce a difference in the electric field of a spherically symmetric charge distribution to account for observed behavior of fermions? Magnetism maybe, he guessed. Would he have to consider incorporating magnetic effects – maybe chromodynamics, the 'strong' force.

Maria squirmed beside him. "Oh," he thought apologetically, "we" will have to consider the incorporation of chromodynamics. She knows a lot more about this than I do. He couldn't consider this endeavor as exclusively his own any longer. There were two of them now, a red and a blue. What was Julie? The green? Certainly he must discuss this with Maria; they were a unit now – not at 'war' in any sense. Indivisible? And Julie? He couldn't get a clear picture of that – RGB, all three of them. He lay silent without thoughts for a bit.

Of course Julie was in the picture. They must get her involved again; she had argued that the Pauli exclusion principle presented an unavoidable road block to his notion of a three-down-quark electron. She wanted him to abandon that intuition and just get on with the direct merger of electrostatics and gravitation. He needed to know the way in which she held to the notion of three downs being incapable of union even if they happen to be tri-colored, and therefore each in a unique state, before he could let that concept go.