I’m re-reading this book published in 1994 in 2021 after the gminus2 results came out. I would have thought that after transporting the Brookhaven National Laboratory's large 600 ton magnet, at a cost of 3 million dollars, the first experiment would have been with the electron to confirm the equipment was working correctly, or have they done this? With the same high precision result from the electron, both experimental and theoretical, then I would have thought would be the time to do the Muon experiment.

Feynman's calculation, (albeit in the mid-1980s) and those that followed, with a few 'erroneous' steps on the theoretical way, used a coupling constant ~0.00729, around 0.7%, is this the same for the Muon? It is 200 times more massive. The coupling constant for the nucleon group called a proton, consisting of 3 quarks, Up, Up & down, around 2.4MeV/c2 for the Up and 4.8MeV/c2 of the Down, has a coupling more like ~1 and he warned theoreticians that the QED way of doing things would not work for such massive particles. The 'proton' mass is 938.272MeV/c2 and so most of the mass of the nucleon 99% is the binding energy to keep the whole thing together; the rest mass of the Quarks amounting to only 9.6MeV/c2. So they are only 20 times heaving than the electron not including the binding energy. What he said about not using his technique for 'Fermions', meaning the nucleons in this instance, looks to be true and the coupling constant, of around 1, produces, according to his book, 'The Strange Theory of Light & Matter' 2.7+/-0.3 for the proton magnetic moment whereas experimentally it was 2.79275, an error of 10% and so 10,000 times less accurate then experiment (p.138 of his QED book)...

So is it a surprise the Muon results don't match well enough… the Muon 206.8 times more massive that the electron, is this anything to be of concern here? the next member of the Lepton family, there being 3 'generations', is the Tauon and is 17 times more massive then the Muon and therefore 3477 times more massive than the electron. I wonder what the magnetic moment of it will be, if it can ever be measured...

The Feynman Diagrams used to calculate the magnetic moment have to be seen to be believed, and what's more, the complex mathematics (with a 's' please) associated with the coupling points which enables this to be achieved, is not for the faint-hearted.

The material on the splitting of the electron when confined, into 3 separate parts, a Holn (charge) a Spinon (well, spin) and Orbiton, has to give us pause for thought. If this IS really what the electron is like and therefore presumably the Muon and Tauon, we are in deep-shit in our understanding of what's going on at this level. The electron splits into 3 wave-functions as I understand it.. HOW, can charge… hate that word, it explains nothing, be a wave-function but see. It’s remarkable. And they thought it would be easy but seems far and away, and we are still 20 orders of magnitude away from the Planck length. The parallel development of mathematics and physics in the 20th century is without any doubt the most noble and beautiful thing our species has ever done, or likely ever will do - the only thing that one could be unequivocally proud of, one that doesn't involve conquest or discrimination (although, yes, there were individuals who did it in the service of such things, but they have always been to its detriment), and that is accessible to anyone from any social or cultural background who wants to put in the work to find out about it. Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonoga and thousand other minds working peaceably and collaboratively, across borders and cultures through some of the ugliest times in history to gift the species with an exacting view of the world that goes far beyond the lumpish native intuition of our ape brains and tells us stories at impossible scales of time and energy. There was no biological reason we should have been able to do even a fraction of it, but there we are.

This is the sort of book that that make be believe I am in a quantum state of belief and unbelief as a consequence of another quantum state, that of comprehension and (99.9999999% ) incomprehension. The older I get, the harder it is to believe that any of this exists: bosons, me, you, the universe, the restaurant at the end of that universe... And yet, what else is there?

Just some thoughts as I have pondered this over a number of years and, as Einstein once stated, to my utter surprise:

'...All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken (Albert Einstein, 1954).' ( )