fundamentalist ‘bootstrap’ hypothesis seeks to
explain nature notthroughfundamentals,but in
Bootstraps-an
alternative philosophy
T P SWETMAN
Cambridgeshire College of Arts and
Technology
In one sense, fundamental physics in this century
may be viewed as revealing progressively smaller
structural components of matter. In the past seventy
years, physicists have achieved an understanding of
the molecular, atomic and nuclear levels of matter in
terms of more basic constituents. The aim of high
energy physics, often called with some justification
the most exciting and most basic of the sciences, is
now directed at introducing order into the somewhat
chaotic world of subnuclear particles. In the accepted
spirit of 20th century reductionist physics, the
‘explanation’ for the existence and variety of the
plethora of subnuclear states is sought in terms of
some underlying and more basic particles, such as
the famous quarks. The success of the unitary sym-
metry classification schemes in the sixties has in-
duced many physicists to expect that this ‘funda-
mental’ triplet of massive, fractionally charged
particles should indeed exist, and much theoretical
and experimental effort has been aimed at their de-
tection. One of the first experiments to be conducted
at any new accelerator facility-be it at Serpukhov
in the USSR, Batavia in Illinois, or Europe’s new
‘big machine’ at CERN-is always a search for the
elusive quark. To dateall such experimental searches
have proved vain, as have related studies in cosmic
ray interactions.
Since many physicists attach such great import-
ance to the concept of some structure such as the
quark as essential to our understanding of present
particle physics, should we then be worried or dis-
appointed by the continuing lackof evidence for the
existence of this basic entity? Although many in the
high energy physics community would undoubtedly
reply in the affirmative to this query, there are
alternativeapproaches which suggest that the im-
portance of ‘fundamentalist’ quarkhunts is con-
siderably overstated. The leading proponent of this
alternative philosophy is Geoffrey Chew, an inter-
nationally respected theoretical physicist atthe
University of California, Berkeley. Chew’s anti-
terms of selfconsistency. To summarize the pro-
found and exciting ideas of the bootstrappers in a
few lines is of course impossible; however one might
perhapsinterpretthe bootstrap concept asstating
that all of the strongly interacting particles (ie the
hadrons, by far the most numerous of the known
‘fundamental particles’) are in some sense composites
of each other, and that none of them are elementary
inthe accepted meaning of the term. Thuseach
hadron may be thought of as playing three different
roles; to quote Chew . . , ‘it may be a “constituent”
of a “composite structure”, it may be “exchanged”
between constituents and thus constitute part of the
force holding the structure together, it may itself be
the entire composite’. For example, a meson might
be viewed as a baryon-antibaryon composite, held
together by an exchange of mesons; and a baryon as a
meson-baryon structure, boundby baryon exchange.
Chew has claimed that such pictures are unaccept-
ably vague since they essentially neglect important
relativistic effects. Nevertheless, they do serve to
convey a picture, albeit imprecise, of the bootstrap
hypothesis, and are therefore of value.
The bootstrap idea has, to date, made few inroads
into the present predominantly fundamentalist
thinking of the high energy physics community, yet
its possible importance not only to particle physics
but to the whole Western culturaltradition of
scientific thought cannot be overstated. To conclude
with Chew’s own words on the desirability of a
‘quark‘ discovery :
‘I would find it a crushing disappointment if in
1980 all of hadron physics could be explained in
terms of a few arbitrary entities. We should then be
in essentially the same posture as in 1930, when it
seemed that neutrons and protons were the basic
building blocks of nuclear matter. To have learned
so little in half a century would to me be the ultimate
frustration.’
REFERENCES
The above is obviously the briefest
of introductions to the
important concepts of the bootstrap hypothesis. Readers
who wish to pursue the subject furtherare referred to the
following articles by Geoffrey Chew.
Chew G 1967 Strong Interactions and the 200 GeV
Accelerator UCRL 17483
Chew G 1968 Science 161 762
Chew G 1970 Physics Today 23 October
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