This book offers a new look at the electron. It was the first elementary particle discovered, is probably one of the simplest, and yet is possibly one of the most misunderstood. The author presents here a straightforward classical model that accurately reproduces the main spectroscopic features of the electron, and also its principal quantum aspects. The key to this model is the relativistically spinning sphere, RSS, which has been clamoring for recognition for decades. Although its electrical charge is point-like, the electron itself is Compton-sized, and is composed mainly of non-electromagnetic "mechanical" matter. The bridge between the electron and the other elementary particles is provided by the fine structure constant alpha 1/137, as manifested in the factor-of-137 spacings between the classical electron radius, electron Compton radius, and Bohr orbit radius. An expanded form of the constant alpha leads to equations that define the transformation of electromagnetic energy into electron mass/energy, and, via the electron doorway, to the formation of higher-mass lepton and hadron ground states. An alpha-quantized mass-generation grid extends accurately from the electron all the way to the top quark t, and leads to a corresponding alpha-quantized particle lifetime grid. The mathematics used in these studies is standard, and the calculations are guided by fits to the experimental elementary particle data. This book is written for all scientists who are interested in recent developments in fundamental particle physics.
About the Author: Malcolm Mac Gregor was born in 1926 in Detroit, Michigan, and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He entered the University of Michigan in 1946, graduating in 1953 with a BA in mathematics and an MA and Ph.D. in physics. Prof. George Uhlenbeck was a member of his thesis committee. He joined the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1953, and ran the first experiments on their variable-energy cyclotron. In 1960 - 1961, he was on a NATO fellowship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He taught several physics courses at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as a thesis adviser in theoretical physics. He was an organizer of the 1967 Gainesville, Florida International Conference on Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering. In 1969 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. During 1970 - 1972, he delivered invited colloquia on particle physics at more than 20 universities in the U. S. and Canada. He has published more than 100 refereed papers in experimental and theoretical physics, and authored The Nature of the Elementary Particle (Springer, 1978) and The Enigmatic Electron (Kluwer, 1992). After retirement from Livermore in 1995, he authored The Power of Alpha (World Scientific, 2007), which was a featured selection of the Scientific American Book Club. He and his wife Eleanor moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1999.