9. Inside the Electron
At this point there appeared on the scene another psychic with an even
more particulate blueprint for the Higgs theory and its superstring
bedfellow. In 1991 Phillips was contacted by a Canadian psychothera-
pist in Toronto, Ron Cowen, who had recognized in Phillips's book
pictures similar to the mental images he experienced during the
Buddhist meditations he had been practicing for twenty years. Ron
Cowen claimed that his siddhi or micro-psi ability manifested in 1985
during meditation while studying the Theravadan Abhidharnrna, an an-
cient Buddhist text. Could this psychic, Phillips wondered, adduce in-
sights into the nature and mechanics of quarks?
Some years earlier, atom smashers at SLAC had identified the parti-
cle that carries the force required to keep quarks glued together as they
whirl around in their proton prison: aptly the s~~ckers christened it a
gluon. Gluons are members of the family of energy particlessuch as
photons and pions-collectively known as bosons after the Indian
physicist S. N. Bose, to distinguish them from more material particles-
such as protons, quarks, and omegons-collectively called fermions in
honor of Enrico Fermi.The zero-mass gluon was seen to be absorbed
and emitted in continuous streams by quarks, creating a binding force,
progressively stronger with distance, that keeps the quarks permanently
trapped within protons and neutrons.
In Phillips's model his omegons, or subquarks-three to a quark-
are equally confined by the same absorption and emission, only of "hy-
pergluons," particles analogous to gluons. As physicists picture protons
to be triplets of quarks held together by Y-shaped strings of gluons,
Phdips pictures quarks as triplets of omegons held together byY-shaped
hypergluons. Only how to substantiate his theory?