Talk:Preon

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Explanation of (partial) cleanup

1) Yershov's research removed: The large amount of text dedicated to Yershov's work was inappropriate. The works mentioned appear to have only been cited once (not including his citations of himself). His work is highly speculative (to put it nicely) and should not appear in an encyclopedic setting.

2) Bilson-Thompson models removed: I removed all references to these models for the same reasons as Yershov's models. The Bilson-Thompson models are on a better standing than Yershov's models, but are also very recent and speculative. The term preon is also used in a very broad sense in their discussion.

3) References to string theory removed: The discussions of string theory as a preon model were bizarre and ill-informed with many strange references to Lubos Motl. String theory as a fundamental theory of nature is concerned with the UV completion of low energy effective field theories and does not relate directly any specific model of leptons, quarks etc. as composits. Criticisms of string theory have their place, but not in a discussion of preons. It is also false to claim that the waxing and waning of string theory's popularity in the physics community has had any effect on the popularity of preon models. There has been an enormous increase in the interest in model building with the coming turn-on of LHC, but no corresponding increase in the popularity of preons. Finally, the comparison between the number of articles on spires about preons and the number of articles about strings was childish and has been deleted.

Comments: This article is in serious need of expert attention. The discussions of the relevant physics are very rough. Composite/preon theories have a sizable literature. They may not be as studied as other approaches, such as grand unification, however, there have been serious papers on the subject and a physicist who has worked in the field is required.

--Iellwood (talk) 18:26, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Simplify

I think this article has too much stuff about the Standard Model in it. The other article can be consulted for the details. The Background section can/should probably be cut down to a third of its present size, or less. - dcljr (talk) 04:07, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Ohwilleke 00:39, 30 July 2005 (UTC) I didn't cut that much, but I did do a significant edit to trim it down. Yershov's Preon Theory & Bilson-Thompson & LQG & mass prediction

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"Yershov Properties of space can be used for explanation of some patterns of nature. For example, topology of space might be responsible for the enigmatic spectrum of masses of quarks and leptons, which so far has not been explained. Here we consider a topological structure discovered in 1882 by F.C.Klein and show that properties of this structure necessarily lead to formation of a set of secondary topological structures, number of which matches the number of known fundamental particles. Some features of these structures can be related to quantum numbers and masses of the particles"

Ohwilleke would you mind donating your summary of yershov's model on your blog to wiki?

Cleanup and improve grammar

This page has been edited a lot recently. Overall the changes are an improvement, but whoever's doing it can you please try to make the changes cleaner and better-written? There are a lot of instances where the same thing is said repeatedly when once would do. I'm happy to do some cleaning-up, but it'd be good to have some help, and it'd be even better if the need for cleaning up was kept to a minimum in the first place. As a starting point the page can be shortened by combining some of the points on the list of motivations for studying preon models (e.g. 'Some supposedly fundamental particles are unstable' and '2nd and 3rd generation fermions decay' should be one bullet-point in a list, not two. Kickaha 21:24, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Another thing-to-do. Shorten the last paragraph of section 2, below the list of considerations. It should be in an article about problems with string theory. We don't need most of that stuff in this article. Kickaha 23:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Fix ambiguity. "The 2003 papers by Yershov [5] [6] are notable for being some of the only papers in the field" - which is it? Are they the only two papers, or are they some of few? "Some of the only" does not express something sensible.

References

Sorry, I added a new reference at the end of the article without realizing that threr were already plenty of references earlier in the article. Why not put all of them at the end? --Philipum 11:09, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Organization Issues

This article is pretty long, and a large part of it is devoted to explaining the Yershov and Bilson-Thompson models. If we are going to have long descriptions of specific preon models, rishons and some others deserve at least as much space as Yershov's version (which I've never heard of) and Bilson-Thompson's model (which isn't even really a preon theory).

But I don't think we want such long descriptions here. It would be much better to have short (one-paragraph) summaries of each important model (including the rishon and Fredrickson models, which currently don't even get a one-sentence description).

Significant models should be split off into their own articles (as with rishon). An article on Bilson-Thompson theory could discuss its connection to LQG, string net condensation, and M-theory in as much depth as its connection to prion theory. But these sections could be improved even without more information, just by organizing them into sectioned articles rather than trying to explain the whole theory in one long section.

Much of the information in the Bilson-Thompson section does actually belong in this article, but in separate sections. The spin foam, Wilson loop, and string net condensation theories are related to prion models in general, not specifically to Bilson-Thompson's model. (Of course because his is the only model that seems to be getting much theoretical attention, the distinction isn't always obvious from a casual glance.)

Also, it's a bit odd to refer to the same model as "Bilson-Thompson" in some sections and "Sundance" in others. I think I may have seen Lee Smolin referring to "sundance prions," but without any citation for that, given that Bilson-Thompson hasn't given his model a unique name, the normal procedure would be to refer to it by his last name, not his first.

Finally, the article is a bit repetitive in its slamming of string theory (which is pretty funny, considering that it ultimately seems to be very pro Bilson-Thompson, and last I heard he was looking at how to derive his prions from M-theory braneworld topology). It's worth explaining why the failure of string theory has led to interest in alternative foundation approaches, but it's not worth explaining more than once. --76.200.100.179 02:08, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

1948-1930 ≠ 30

In the "Preons in popular culture" section, it is apparently said that there has been thirty years of development between 1930 and 1948. Does anyone know which of the numbers are in error? Drhex 12:25, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I've corrected "thirty" -> "eighteen" as most references seem to corroborate 1930 and 1948 as correct editions: 1930 by Amazing Stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Smith 1948 by Fantasy Press: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Press Alefu 22:07, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Mass paradox

I feel there is a problem in the desciption of the mass paradox : the uncertainty principle, put in that way, tells us about the uncertainty in momentum, but it does not tell about the mass-energy. Momentum and energy are not the same thing, even if the units to describe them both are written "GeV". Usually this issue is described in terms of "compositeness scale" (Lambda), which has energy units. The compositeness scale is the scale of preon binding. There are experiments that indicate that the compositeness scale is larger than 1 TeV (for this number, one may refer to the PDG tables). To my understanding, there is a mass paradox only if we suppose that the second and third generations are excited states of the first one, since the differences in binding energies should be of the same order of magnitude as the compositeness scale, which is not the case for many of the observed masses. Philipum (talk) 08:41, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

OK I think I see : E² = p² + m², thus the energy is always greater than the momentum, and this is implicit in the reasoning. Perhaps it should be written in a more precise manner, though. Philipum (talk) 08:47, 23 December 2008 (UTC)