By the turn of the twentieth century most physicists accepted the notion that the final irreducible constituent of all physical reality was the electromagnetic field. The idea completely explained a phenomena that was well known at that time. It explained the perplexing mystery of why the speed of light was the same in all frames of reference.

When I retired from AT & T in 1986 I began a study of that old idea. I found that with just a little tweaking to advance our knowledge about electromagnetic fields, the old idea did explain all of the reality that we know about. Below are some of my observations.

1. Bending a photon's path produces positive feedback.

   • This notion came to me somewhere around the year 1986 as I pondered how matter might condense out of electromagnetic fields. There would be some mechanism that trapped the fields into quantum chunks of mass. I knew that there was evidence of positive feedback when photon paths were bent. Einstein knew about this and incorrectly attributed its cause to distorted space near massive objects.

   • This positive feedback tends to bend the photon's path more in the same direction. The force of the feedback is equal to the force that is causing the bend in the photon's path. The path is thus bent twice as much as would be caused by the outside force by itself.

   • This positive feedback can be observed in the light from distant stars. The path of this light is bent twice as much as gravity alone can account for when it passes close to a massive object on the way to earth.

   • Everywhere in electromagnetic phenomena the effect of resonant frequencies is very powerful. As I thought about this it came to me that positive feedback and resonance is the mechanism that binds photons in resonant patterns to form particles of matter. Half of the effect is due to positive feedback and the other half to resonance.

   • The electric charge produced in the photon's bent path forms a cavity. The photon is trapped in this cavity.
2. The shell structure of nuclear particles.

   • I remembered seeing a brief note in one of Isaac Asimov's books about Robert Hofstadter's suggestion that nuclear particles might be made of shells. Although I don't remember it as such, this is probably the beginning of my idea that nuclear particles exist in a shell structure.

   • I knew that hadron spectra suggested that nuclear particles were structured. There seemed to be three of something within a proton and four of something within a neutron. No structure was ever found in an electron.

   • Protons would then be composed of three electron-like shells and neutrons would be composed of four. The inside shells would be more massive and smaller in size. The inner shells would need be exponentially more massive than the outer to get the sums of the masses to equate to observations.

   • I have never seen any of Hofstadter's work except as referenced in "Gauge Theories in Particle Physics", by I. J. R. Aitchison & A. J. G. Hey.

     Nevertheless, a surprisingly simple 'shell model' approach is capable of giving an excellent description of all the known hadronic spectra, in terms of the (qqq) and (qq) picture (Isgur and Karl 1983). The problem, as we shall ultimately see is how to relate this to QCD!

     I had already completed the "Square of the Shells Rule" before I read that quote, but it reinforced my thinking. I had always thought that Quark's were aptly named.

3. Square of the shells rule.

   • The Square Of The Shells Rule is: With the mass and the electric charge of the electron taken as unity, and starting with the mass and the force of electric charge of a neutron's outer shell, the mass and the force of electric charge of the inner particle shells is equal to the square of that of the next shell out.

   • If the nuclear particles were made of resonant electromagnetic shells, the exact mass of two of the shells would already be defined. This would be that of the electron, and the outer shell of the neutron. The neutron's outer shell would have to comprise the mass difference between a proton and a neutron. I knew that this was about 2.5 electron masses.

   • I wrote a little graphics program to simulate an electromagnetic field trapped in a resonant circle. It must complete a circle in a multiple of its wave length to satisfy resonance. I was interested to see how many wave lengths would complete one circle.

   • The program showed me that the same electrical polarity of the field remained on the outside of the circle when one wave length completed the circle.

   • Then I started experimenting to find the masses of the inner shells. The sum of the masses of all the shells would be that of the parent particle. Since there were four shells, the sum of the inside three would equate to the mass of the proton. The sum of all four would equate to the mass of the neutron. This relationship formed a criteria that I would use for my computer programs.

   • Nature seems to always provide a mathematical key to its makeup so there must be a key to the relationship of the shells, one to another. The first key I tried was that each inner shell's mass would be the square of the mass of the next shell out when taken in terms of electron masses.

   • I saw right away that starting with the neutron's outer shell mass as 2.5499146 electron masses the criteria was met. I knew the criteria need not be exact to the extended decimal because of the dynamics of the binding structure. There would be a slight difference between the theoretical and the measured mass. This was well known in the workings of chemical compounds and so should come as no surprise here.

   • The effective force of the electric charge of each of the inner shells is much greater than that of the electron because of their smaller radius. When the force of charge of the inner shells are sensed at the radius of the larger electron, they are exactly that of the electron.

4. Howcome the Quantum. Electromagnetic saturation.
   • This notion came to me early in the 1980's. I knew that a photon must saturate if consisted of electromagnetic fields. Planck's constant shows up in equations at exactly the place where you would expect to see amplitude. Amplitude is strangely absent from the equations. If the fields exist, they must exist at some amplitude. If that amplitude is a variable, it must be in equations that calculate photon action. Since amplitude is not there, it must be a constant.

   • Then I realized a fact immediately obvious but strangely absent from teachings. Planck's constant is the electromagnetic saturation amplitude of free space.

   • All of the quantum effects in the universe result from the way that light propagates through space. Each photon exists in a spacial area with two points of saturated amplitude. The points are opposite in polarity with one following the other through space.

5. Electromagnetic gravity.

   • Gravity was the greatest problem and was the last of my realizations. At first I thought of a jumble of electromagnetic remnants as the diminished fields from all photons mingled in space. Then when I saw that electromagnetic saturation was the natural form of photon central points, I knew the answer. It was solid. It was mathematically predictable.

   • The answer is this: The saturation amplitude of the central point in photons must be reached within the remnant fields of all other photons in the universe. These fields contribute toward saturation. Electromagnetic saturation amplitude is a property of space itself. Saturation must therefore occur at an offset toward increasing field strength of the remnant fields. That is gravity.
6. Nuclear Dynamics.

   • It was sometime after the year 2000 that I realized that the mechanism of nuclear dynamics was obvious in the photon particle structure that I hypothesized. The strong nuclear force seems to increase with distance for a very short distance, then disappear when that distance is exceeded.

   • I knew that electric charge amplitudes equal to the strong force were present in the model, but didn't realize how the dynamic developed. When I pondered this in my later years, I saw that the inner shells of protons must be trapped inside the outer shells.

   • This gives the dynamic, but there is a lingering doubt about the charge amplitude. It must develop from the two outside shells of the proton, shells 2, and the two inner shells 3. The sum of these four add up to the value of the strong nuclear interaction.

   • There is, however, another possibility. It is possible that the two shells 4 might punch through shells 3 and find equilibrium. That situation could provide a much more powerful bond. That kind of binding might be what we see in neutron stars and such.

7. The Nature of the Electron Orbit.

   • There is a problem with the classic notion that electrons might orbit atomic nuclei and be held in place by electromagnetic force. Instead they seem to exist in a kind of cloud around the nuclei. In the model that I propose, the electrons engulf the nuclei with the same shell structure pattern as the nucleons themselves. Electrons avoid ever being in the same state by occupying different planes around the nuclei.

   • I realized this just recently and may never develop a solid hypothesis about it. There is enough information about probable positions of electrons around nuclei to allow some good ideas. The overlapping planes must necessarily predict the dumbbell shaped patterns we observe for electron positions around nuclei.