Musings in the museyroom

“Symmetry Principles at High Energy” can be read either as a caption or a headline; the double meaning might have pleased the great Irish novelist whose quarks have, in one form or another, dominated this year's conference. The Coral Gables Conference, meeting again in the University of Miami's Lowe Art Gallery (the “museyroom” of the title), between January 20 and 22 of this year, heard a number of contributions dealing with relativistic extensions of the static SU (6) quark model, itself an extension of the SU (3) octet model; these extensions invariably led to a symmetry group called either $Ũ(12)$ or M (12) based on twelve fundamental generators or “objects”. The reward for enlarging the symmetry group consists of larger supermultiplets, for example, the pseudoscalar octet is united with the nine vector mesons, and the baryon octet with the decuplet. Having a formally relativistic theory makes possible the writing of $Ũ(12)$ invariant interactions among these thirty‐five mesons and baryons which involve only two independent (and known) coupling constants! The theory is also simple enough that important new consequences can be derived with relative ease. Some of these will be mentioned below, and others will undoubtedly, within a short time, begin to fill the pages of the physics journals. But, it should be emphasized that this is only a beginning and that the present forms of U (12) are incomplete; they may also have other difficulties, which will be mentioned subsequently.