Toward a New Concept of Elementary Particles

The universe is not to be narrowed down to the limits of the understanding, ··which has been men's practice up to no·w, but the understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the image of the universe as it is discovered. 1. In this issue, we wish to give a systematic survey of papers that have been published by Japanese physicists who adopted a new point of view toward the concept of elementary particles. In contrast to the current view that the elementary particles are the ultimate building stones of matter, we believe that nature as a whole has a structure of inexhaustible depth, and each of the different kinds of atomistic conceptions, such as molecule, atom, nucleus, elementary particle, and so forth, stands for each of the qualitatively different levels of matter disclosed one after another by deeper studies. We should never expect to find out the deepest level of matter, because there are certainlymore elements in it than we can possibly be aware of at any particular stage of scientific development. Also we should never regard the field theory of elementary particles as the final theory of matter, because qualitatively new laws might be found at new levels. The current view of the elementary particle arose firstly from the misbelief in unlimited validity of the present theory, in which it is assumed to be a mathematical point described by a local field. It was only an approximation to reality at a particular stage of our knowledge to assume that the elementary particles were structureless and occupied no space at all. But, with a great success of the field theory based on the point model, the majority of physicists became to believe that the elementary particles were the deepest level in the structure of matter, because a mathematical point is certainly indivisible. Later on, in order to get rid of the divergence difficulties that ap)eared in the present theory, many attempts were made to modify the roint model by introducing the so-called "universal length" or "cutoff factor". Nevertheless, the misbelief that the elementary particles were the deepest level of matter, and the dynamical laws which govern this level were the final theory of matter, has scarcely been doubted so far.