Saturday, December 26, 2009

Parity Invariance

The Mystery of Parity
"And should I not take pity on Nineveh, that great city, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants who do not know their right hand from their left, and many beasts besides?" [Jonah 4:11]
In this article we shall be concerned with microscopic parity invariance and a mystery which it presents. This consists of a marriage of internal and space-time symmetries, forbidden when the space-time symmetry consists of the whole Poincare group but permitted in this case because of the discrete nature of the parity transformation. We will argue that this marriage could point to regularities underlying the nature of quarks and leptons, and to extensions of particle interactions beyond those known today.

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