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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