There are loads of theories that describe the processes that go on inside the nucleus. In order to be taken seriously, each must be consistent with the observed behavior of the subatomic processes that they describe as far as the level of our understanding of those processes go.
Fro example. one of the originators of the quark theory, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, assumed that the up quark had an electric charge of 2e / 3, where e is the fundamental electronic charge, while the down quark had a charge of –e / 3. This fractional charge theory seems to work well enough at this juncture. However, LENR may reveal a more fundamental theoretical approach that would privilege a more abstract basic principle which would lead to structures that could be physically interpretable as a force between a group of three particles, but that originated at a deeper level of explanation. A particularly interesting fact, which is seldom now mentioned in textbooks, is that the original colored quark theory of M. Y. Han and Yoichiro Nambu (HN) which followed on from the first quark theories of Gell-Mann and Zweig proposed a different assignment of electric charges to the quarks.5 Han and Nambu saw that exactly the same results could be obtained using integral and zero charges and assigning an integral baryon number to a single quark. Up-Blue => +1 Up-Red => +1 Down-Green => -1` Other => 0 In this representation, ‘colour’ came about because the quarks were actually different in structure. In the Gell-Mann-Zweig version (GMZ), this had to be added subsequently as an extra property. It is important to realise, however, that the two models are, in fact, merely different representations of the same physical theory, and, from the point of view of quark phenomenology, represent exactly the same physics. The discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect, put into question that fractional charge is fundamental, as a postulate of the quark theory. Despite all this, the underlying representation based on integral charges has seemingly dropped out of view entirely in the last thirty years. It was never disproved, but just faded away, despite the repeated citation of the HN paper as the origin of colour theory. If a reason needed to be given for this, it would be that the phenomenology supports fractional charges, which is, of course, true for both representations. It would seem that the building of large accelerators and the opportunities they provided for experimental investigation of models tended to concentrate effort into providing detailed prediction and interpretation of the phenomenology and that, if an established model was able to do this, then there was no point in looking at alternatives which provided identical results. So, why does it matter which theory we use if they both lead to the same model for QED? The answer here is that some physical theories depend on deeper and sometimes hidden symmetries which may not be obvious but have a significant effect on the predictions that can be made. There are areas where the deeper symmetries might produce significantly different results for different representations of a model which gives the same QED phenomenology. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the fundamentally integral nature of charges is a strong argument in favour of unification in that the QED phenomenology of quarks is determined by the behavior of a nonelectric (strong) force, just as the QED phenomenology of electrons in the fractional quantum Hall effect is seemingly determined by the nonelectric (presumably weak) force involved in creating a pseudobosonic state. The problem faced by having 3 separate ‘units’ of charge (e / 3, 2e / 3 and e), with its implication that the electron, with e, may not actually be ‘elementary’, would also disappear. The HN representation, suggested originally by one Nobel Prize winner and indirectly supported by another, has never been disproved, and fell out of favor more or less by accident. It would make sense to see if it can lead to insights in other problematic areas of physics, especially as it leads to testable predictions within the experimental capacities of both high energy physics and LENR.. http://xxx.tau.ac.il/pdf/1308.5900.pdf Abstract Orthogonality between and Z boson involves the Weinberg angle and a scheme for assignments of electric charge and weak isospin to leptons and quarks coupling to and Z. The Han-Nambu scheme, with integer electric charges for quarks, satisfies Z orthogonality with sin2(_W) = 0.25 in leading order. Experimental results for photon-photon fusion into c¯c and b¯b pairs provide further support for assigning integer electric charges to quarks.
