Just after the turn of the century, D'Arcy Thompson wrote a seminal book called "On Growth and Form". One theme is that 'form' tends to repeat itself on different geometric scales. Two-way mirrored self-symmetry of the kind made famous by Fractal images seems to be nature's way.
One wonders if the electron - which seems to be indivisible in our 3-space is composed of more basic material in another dimension. The electron is the subatomic particle with perhaps the best claim to being fundamental - the best candidate for Democritus's idea of an "uncuttable" unit. The proton 'cuts', of course, and the mass of a proton is ~1836 times that of a single electron. Modern followers of Dirac try to frame reality into various aspects of the *epo* the electron-positron pair. For a proton to be formed this way, i.e. from epos, the 918 electrons and 918 positrons would have to condense within what appears to be the same space (from our perspective which will be called 3-space) -but done in such a way that only the charge of a single positron was evident. There is a real model, or at least a good analogy, for this in the BEC, or Bose-Einstein Condensate. Is something similar going on 'behind' the electron? Consider the possibility - more like the heresy - that the electron is itself composed of nearly a thousand basic units of 'something' - or nearly 500 paired-units of something which may be similar to the photon... suspend disbelief that the hypothesis has little basis in experiment yet, but look at the reasoning why the idea is curiously alluring nevertheless. As a starting point for the actual number for this basic unit, following D'Arcy Thompson we can consider 918 or 459 pairs or 918 pairs. This might involve fractional charge - or maybe not. Electric charge once appeared to come in an indivisible unit: the charge of a single electron e... at least most of the time. Fractional charge has been found, and then found controversial, for over 70 years, and this present idea takes it to extremes. Some good proof for fractional 'charge carriers' came along in 1997, and the subject refuses to die. Indeed, quarks were thought to be the only particles with fractional charge - and they only exist in larger particles that have an integer charge. And that may give a good analogy to the situation with the electron - i.e. the fractional charge is there but in another dimension and usually only shows up (in our 3-space) in the larger particle of integer charge, the electron. But in 1997 physicists from Weizmann Institute in Israel and the CEA laboratory near Paris revealed the first modern direct evidence that an electric current can be carried by "quasiparticles" with fractional charge. But older experiments *including those of Robert Millikan himself* have found them. Millikan is regarded by some as one of the founders of modern American science - but he was also guilty of pathological science, ignoring evidence and fudging experiments, and he has held-back progress for a half-century on fractional charge, partly because of his underserved reputation and flawed experiment. The results of the 1997 study agree with a theory which was formulated by Robert Laughlin in 1982 to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. According to Laughlin, electrons in strong magnetic fields form an exotic new collective state, similar to the BEC state in supercold helium. But any BEC-like agglomeration of electrons, although it may fit in with the experimental work of Ken Shoulders, will produce greater charge than a single electron, even if non-integer, and not less. An updated and automated Millikan experiment was undertaken at SLAC but it was seriously flawed by the assumption that nothing less than about 15% of the electron charge would be found. And nothing greater was found by them. In fact, my opinion is that if you want to find fractional charge (FC), you need to look closely for something negative at less than 1 %e ! That value constraint totally changes the way the experiment can be meaningfully run. An analysis of de Broglie's photon concept is critical to understanding FC, as it serves to explain why a pair of oppositely charged massive particles are produced from single real 1.022 MeV photons. Basically it is this: photons are not one particle but two. A two particle photon may appear neutral and indivisible most of the time, but it is not located in our 3-space most of the time, and moreover, it may have a dual * internal structure* oscillating between its electric and magnetic aspects, or two bound force carriers. This leads to the conclusion (based on mirroring of structure) that electrons and positrons could themselves very well maintain the same internal dynamic oscillating structure of the photon, but on a larger scale at a higher dimension, using paired units of photon-like particles. The only difference between and electron and positron being a final locked-in change in the electromagnetic orientation of the pair - whether "turned-in" or "turned-out." The ele! ctron would have 459 paired units with negative charge-carriers facing outward and the positron would have those same carriers turned inward. IOW the positron is more like a 'hole' and the 'positive' charge itself is only an illusion in one sense. Wow. Try telling thousands of EEs and PhDs that there is no real positive charge - that positive is really only virtual - that positive is really only a hole in space through which a hidden negative charge is pulling ! Think you might hit a brick wall with that one ! It is a little less controversial that charge and charged mass are not identical. The charged particle is thus said to be a composite of massless charge coupled to chargeless mass. The "charge" can be described as a flux of 4-D particles coupled to the observable mass. Mass can be described as static but having inertia and is three-dimensional and spatial; while charge is dynamic, never static, four-dimensional and 'virtual' only because it is 4-D and can't yet be measured in our 3-space directly without its mass-attachment. It is tempting to try to incorporate the fine structure constant here. "Charge and Energy Transfer Dynamics" are a whole complicated field, and it is dangerous to say that that mass and charge are firmly related by way of the ratio of about one to 137, but if so, there are ways to discover the effective minimum value of the fractional charge, which I am guesstimating will be effectively convertible into a mass-energy of 3.4 eV. For the sake of space, lets call a massless neutral-appearing photon-like entity the 'electrogen' but also realize that the electrogen itself has two parts - hidden charge, which is always negative and a magnetic component which can totally shield that hidden charge from everything in 3-space. Charge has been traditionally measured in coulombs, a rather bizarre unit. One proton is said to have a charge of 1.602x10^ E-19 C and the electron likewise e = 1.602x10^E-19 Coulombs. Charge can be related mathematically to force, force to power, power to energy, and energy to mass. And it is certain that the fine structure constant is in there at different levels, but it is not clear if the mass-only component of the mass-energy of the electron's 511 keV is identifiable, nor the electrogen's presumed 3.4 eV. The two might well be decoupled, like the higher energy variety, depending on how one defines an aether. Decoupling is meaningful at higher energy in regards of de Broglie's hypothesis on the possible internal structure of photons. Considering the discoveries made since Maxwell, de Broglie came to the conclusion that the only way for a photon to satisfy Bose-Einstein's statistic and Planck's Law; and also to perfectly explain the photoelectric effect while obeying Maxwell's equations and conforming to the properties of Dirac's theory of complementary symmetry, would be that it has duality and consisted, not of one corpuscle (basic item), but of two corpuscles, or half-photons, which would be complementary like the electron is complementary to the positron. I emphasize 'complimentary' rather than polarity. The two are different enough that everyone should take the time to understand how different. IOW actual 'annihilation's is extremely rare! That might help to explain how an electron can be composed of 459 pairs which themselves appear neutral but yet at the same time can give negative charge to the electron, or if turned inside out can give a 'virtual' positive charge to the positron. This is necessitated, as mentioned, by there being no such thing as *real* positive charge. The photon, then would be made up of two elementary particles of spin h/4p, and it has an electromagnetic field linked to the probability of self-annihilation, a field that obeys Maxwell's equations and has all of the characteristics of electromagnetic light waves. When photons of minimum energy of 1.022 MeV interact with a nucleus, the interaction between the two half-photons and the quarks often disrupts the internal equilibrium of the photon and cause both half-photons to decouple and separate as a pair - an electron-positron pair. Therefore, the half-photon and not the photon would necessarily be the elementary particle if they were really indivisible, but in the electrogen, perhaps duality is inherent. The "normal" QED definition of photons is similar to de Broglie's in that we have to deal with two very different definitions of photons: One is the real free moving electromagnetic photon, and the second is the so-called virtual QED photon - but just because it is virtual to our limited perspective doesn't mean it isn't real in 4D. By definition, QED virtual photon deals only with the electrostatic aspect energy (Coulomb interaction between charged particles). And if the electron is *composed* of 918 units of electrogens, half of w! hich are QED virtual - then what are the other half? ...maybe something closer to neutrino than photon? Getting back to the 918 items. We find that 511 KeV /918 = ~556.6 eV, not exactly a well-know value, so we can assume that these electrogens are unlikely to be found in our 3-space. But where? If they are merely subatomic, then they would be related to our 3-space by a fourth power law, one might assume (perhaps fifth power). But if both subatomic and interdimensional, who know? And of course the fine structure constant changes things somewhere... ...the hunt goes on... More later, Jones Three statisticians went hunting one day for wild hares... While walking along, they flushed a rabbit out of the brush and send him madly hopping. The first statistician shot, and there was a puff of dust 1 meter behind the rabbit. The second shot and there was a puff of dust one meter in front of the rabbit. The third one yelled, "We got it!!"
