Abstract

Symmetry: Culture and Science
Volume 35, Number 3, pages 359-361 (2024)
https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2024_3_359

CAN WE DERIVE PHYSICS FROM A SINGLE OPERATOR?

Peter Rowlands

Physics Department, University of Liverpool, Oliver Lodge Laboratory, Oxford St, Liverpool, L69 7ZE, UK.k
Email: p.rowlands@liverpool.ac.uk

1 INTRODUCTION

At the most basic level, physics consists only of fermions and antifermions and their interactions, which can be expressed in terms of gauge bosons. Fermions, whether as free fermions or as coloured quarks combining in sets of three, together with their corresponding antifermions, follow well-established group symmetry patterns. Just four interactions are currently known: gravity and the three-gauge interactions: electric, strong and weak. If any symmetry connects these interactions, it is badly broken at the energies available to current experiments.

The Standard Model of particle physics describes three different gauge symmetries for the gauge interactions, based on different Lie groups, though it has long been hoped that, at some much higher energy, possibly somewhere close to the Planck mass where quantum gravity might also be involved, renormalization will make their coupling constants merge into a single value. This hints at the possibility that there is a real symmetry involved in the process even though it appears broken at the level of current observation (Georgi & Glashow, 1974)...