JTfM Vol 1 No 1 2008 - ONLINE EDITION - Inclusionality Research

Superchannel—Inside and Beyond Superstring
quark and an anti-quark. In that case, a proton is a baryon, that is a type of hadron, made of
three quarks. These are two up quarks and one down quark (uud). The example of the meson
is a pion which is made of an up quark and a down antiquark.
The definitive presupposition or ‘prophecy’ that is guiding the investigations that single
out these hadrons is that things are made of atoms, which are point-like. This prophecy
continued to be self-fulfilling until the quarks emerged. Before then, based on the same outlook,
particles could be isolated from one another even if they are, based on the foundations
that produced them, isolated from space to make them conform with the discrete numbers of
classical and modern mathematics even down to the fractions. Trouble began when it was
discovered that quarks cannot be isolated from one another or the hadron that includes them.
Since to launch a new foundation in which point-likeness does not hold would bring the
whole of physics tumbling down, the only solution is to refine the outlook. The requisite refinement
was provided by Richard Feynman (in Why Hadron Physics DRAFT 2000, bj).
A vizualisation based on Feinman’s refinement requires that the reference frame is removed
from the laboratory, in which electrons? collide with energetic protons moving in opposite
direction with the speed of light. This reference frame requires proton to be viewed as
a beam of point-like constituents. These constituents are called partons. The electrons therefore
collide with partons which are now viewed as quarks.
As the field enters 1970, questions that could not be answered surfaced. One of them
puts the picture of quark into question. The other asks to know why during violent collisions,
quarks could not be knocked completely free. This is called confinement in nuclear physics.
Confinement is the phenomenon in physics that ‘colour-charged’ particles such as quarks
cannot be isolated. Confinement states simply, “you can never pull hard enough to liberate a
quark from a proton”. Quarks are confined by strong interaction to form pairs and triplets
whose net colour (nothing to do with colours but just a way of giving names to quarks) is
neutral. We shall have more to say on this phenomenon later.
The theoretical response to this is to conclude that quarks are bound together by elementary
strings with constant force that is independent of the string as presented below in
which q stands for quark and bar-q stands for anti-quark. Quark and anti-quark therefore
constitute geometrically, the ends of the line – Planck length – that is the string.
This idea was extensively developed but it couldn’t explain the phenomena from
which it arose. For a while, the sun was allowed to set on it. When it resurfaced, it was not
applied to the force between quarks but was directed to the synthesis of quantum mechanics
and the gravity of general relativity with other forces in nature. It is here that string theory
finds itself up to this day.
In all this, what string theory initially sets out to do is to understand the properties of
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Journal of Transfigural Mathematics Vol.1 No.1.2008