Why do we have three flavors or three families of quarks and of lepton, when most theories can be self-consistent with only one family?


Submitted by Chiu Chan-Chi, student.

Is any fundamental thing being forgotten? Many theories try to explain three flavors by using anomaly cancellation or fixed points in string theory but all of them push the energy scale of those theories up to very high level which can't be tested by experiment now. Is there any basic thing which is ignored? Although the three-family question is old and unsolved, it is still very important since sit seems to give us a hint that our theory is not complete when most theories can be self-consistent by using one family only but we generalize it and make it to be three times bigger and we still have some things such as renormalization which force us using ∞ - ∞= finite number in quantum field theory. Something fundamental seems to be absent!!!

 


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