The visible universe is overwhelmingly baryonic and overwhelmingly hydrogenous. At ordinary cosmological scales, a representative local sample of baryonic matter consists primarily of proton–electron plasma. In terms of ‘up’ and ‘down’ quark content, the simplest electrically neutral representative inventory would therefore be six quarks — two ups and four downs based on their acknowledged charge content. Further rationale will be specified as we proceed.
Rather than beginning with these predefined particles, we begin with only charge distributions of which they are comprised, carrying the quantum numbers associated with the up and down quarks.
Electrostatic interactions among charged distributions are governed by Poisson’s equation and boundary conditions. However, point-charge solutions result in singular self-energies and divergent interaction behavior at vanishing separation. To avoid these pathologies, the present model includes the central origin of distributions to be a ‘boundary’ when solving Poisson’s equations. This replaces point charge solutions with finite charge distributions characterized by intrinsic scale lengths and provides a meaningful self-energy to associate with particle rest masses.
Once finite distributions are admitted and given indivisibility properties of associated particles, overlap of distributions becomes physically meaningful. Like-charge overlap increases self-energy appreciably, while opposite-charge overlap lowers total energy through binding. In this framework, overlap and binding are not separate phenomena, but opposite signs of the same pairwise energetic process.
The central question then becomes:
What stable or metastable organizational states emerge from the six interacting charge distributions as thermal energy decreases?
At sufficiently high thermal energies, the six quarks remain effectively unbound and spatially separated — ‘quark soup’. As thermal energy falls, progressively more convergent structures become energetically accessible. Some organizations are transient, some metastable, and some may emerge as persistent particle-like states.
The model therefore treats protons, electrons, neutral “duds,” and more speculative structures such as an octahedral neutron not as fundamental primitives, but as emergent quasi-stable organizations of interacting charge distributions.
To classify these possibilities, we organize the six-quark state space into:
- structural families,
- overlap-energy levels,
- geometric binding configurations,
- and thermally accessibility regimes.
The resulting framework is simultaneously:
- electrostatic,
- combinatorial,
- thermodynamic,
- and organizational.
The purpose of the work is not merely to catalogue possible structures, but to investigate whether the observed particle content of baryonic matter may arise naturally from the energetics of finite charge distributions governed by Poisson-like interactions. The present work should be regarded as an exploratory organizational model intended to investigate whether observed baryonic structures can emerge naturally from finite charge-distribution energetics.
That’s the agenda; it is underway.
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