"Assumptions of Symmetry"

Always seeking harmony, man sees the universe--for a few brief moments--as a pleasingly simple machine. Then curiosity about the nature of matter gets the better of him. Democritus conceived matter as only a whirl of tiny, indivisible units called atoms. Plato disagreed, saw it as a symmetrical expression of mathematical relations between five basic structures. Then came the theory of light radiating in continuous waves. German Physicist Max Planck overturned that in 1900; he said energy comes in discontinuous particles--or quanta--and Einstein followed him with the idea that light can be thought of as both particle and wave.

Today's physicists, bursting open the atom's nucleus to find myriad minute particles, are right back where it all started. Using giant accelerators such as the Berkeley bevatron, they can measure the results of events inside the nucleus, but not all of it makes sense. Where is harmony?

Last week two impressive efforts toward the definitive statement of harmony were announced. In West Berlin, before a meeting of scientists that honored the late Max Planck's 100th birth date, German Physicist Werner Heisenberg, 56, reported that he is prepared to make "a suggestion for the basic equation of matter." In Manhattan, before a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, German-born Dr. John Grebe, 58, director of Dow Chemical Co.'s nuclear, research, proposed "a periodic table for fundamental particles" that might help "explain the material of the universe."

Uncertainty. Neither theory is anywhere near being tested. To avoid "sensation," Heisenberg will not even publicly release his equation until next month. But physicists look for much from Heisenberg, head of the famed Max Planck Institute in Goettingen, and often called Einstein's successor. In 1932 Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize for one of modern physics' key laws, "the uncertainty principle," which holds that subatomic events cannot be observed individually without changing them by the very act of observation.

Now Heisenberg reportedly proposes to add a third unit of measure to both Planck's constant ("the quantum of action'') and the fixed velocity of light, which Einstein used in formulating his Special Theory of Relativity, the structure of space and time. Said Heisenberg: "There must be still a third such natural unit of measurement which is conceived in present-day atomic physics as a length of the atomic order of magnitude--for example, the size of the diameter of simple atomic nuclei. The goal of atomic theory would be reached if one succeeded in stating a mathematical structure which does not contain any arbitrary constants besides these three natural units of measurement, and from which the various known elementary particles with their proportions can be derived."

Einstein sought precisely this: a unified field theory. Relativity, which explained the motion of large bodies in a gravitational field, has never explained the behavior of subatomic particles, which are controlled by electric forces. Yet both presumably obey the same general laws, since both are matter. Whether or not Heisenberg's "suggestion" can be proved experimentally, his goal is the classic one: "The future theory of matter will probably contain, as conceived in Plato's philosophy, only assumptions of symmetry.

Already now these assumptions of symmetry can be stated to a large extent; they seem to show that the future theory will be very simple and concise in its fundamentals, despite all complications of its inferences."

Ultrasimplicity. U.S. physicists who have seen Heisenberg's equation still feel that it cannot quite explain all they see in their accelerators. Dr. John Grebe (rhymes with Hebe) begins with what they do see. A noted industrial researcher who was a leader in the wartime development of styrene for synthetic rubber, Grebe nevertheless has the same classical approach as Heisenberg. The secret of why the fundamental particles of matter somehow hold together in the atomic nucleus, he feels, must be less complicated than researchers believe. Reason: the rest of nature is "so beautiful and orderly and ultrasimple."

Working with what is known about the 28 accelerator-produced new particles, Grebe theorizes that they may all be multiples or combinations of only two: pairs of the negatively charged electron and the positively charged electron (positron). Reason is his discovery of two key particle ratios: that between the mass of mu and pi mesons, and that between the mass of the proton and sigma hyperon. Each proves to equal TT divided by four; this produces a new constant (1.12888), based on the inverse of the square root of TT divided by four, which Grebe calls "g." This tool "opens the door," produces a periodic table of particles similar to Mendeleev's 19th century periodic table of chemical elements. To compile it, Grebe assigns gDEG to the electron and positron as his base. In turn, the various exponents of g for the other particles yield a set of symmetrical relations. These relations indicate the presence of a number of proportional dimensions for solids in the ratio of two, three and four. When

Grebe adds a time-related dimension, velocity in the form of relativistic mass, the results match the known values for the particle masses.

Other men have unsuccessfully focused on the electron and positron as the atom's "building blocks." Grebe hopes his table may have turned the trick. For it would, he suggests, indicate that gravity itself is an electromagnetic force accountable in electromagnetic terms. Like many another, this "unified field theory" may also fail. But, says Grebe, "the mathematical relations discovered cannot help but remain and be a useful step forward."

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