14 - The magnetic monopole

Summary

The problem of permanent quark confinement became more and more intriguing to me during 1973 and 1974. What we knew was only that the color forces on the naked quarks at small distances are relatively small compared with the forces between dressed quarks at larger distances from each other. This was the ‘negative screening effect’ I mentioned in the previous chapter. It seems plausible that if this is extrapolated to larger distances, the color forces among quarks will continue to increase. The forces could easily become so strong that they keep the quarks permanently together. But is this really what happens? The essential difficulty was that because the forces are so great, calculations are nearly impossible. The only thing we are good at is performing calculations on particles that move in approximately straight lines. This is certainly not what quarks do when the forces are so strong. So the question became: is there a fundamental reason why quarks will remain invisible forever? Why do the field lines in a color theory form sausages, as in Figure 14, without spreading apart as in ‘ordinary’ electric and magnetic fields? If this could be explained, perhaps a calculational scheme could be devised to explain the properties of hadrons. I tried all sorts of things to find an answer.