The Dirac Equation and the Superluminal Electron Model

When quantum mechanics was being established in the mid 1920’s, Paul A. M Dirac did not seek a visualizable model of the electron or other quantum mechanical objects. But a number of the quantitative physical properties of the electron described by the Dirac equation are of a spatial or temporal nature that can lend themselves to visualizable physical modeling. A recently proposed superluminal quantum model of the electron by the author (Gauthier, 2005) has several of these characteristics. The present article summarizes some of the main quantitative attributes of the Dirac electron and describes how the superluminal model of the electron embodies a number of these attributes. The utility of any physical model is to help deepen one’s understanding of a physical process or object corresponding to the model, and to suggest new experiments. Whether the superluminal model of the electron can serve this purpose for the Dirac electron is left for the reader to decide.