Category:Toroidal Ring

This category collects work on toroidal ring models of elementary particles — the proposition that the electron, proton and other particles are not dimensionless points but real physical objects consisting of charge circulating in a ring or torus.

The tradition begins with Alfred Lauck Parson's "magneton" of 1915, developed by Arthur Holly Compton in the years following and largely abandoned after the success of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s. It was revived in the later twentieth century by Winston H Bostick (Compton's last graduate student), Thomas G Barnes, and above all by David L Bergman, whose 1990 spinning charged ring model with J. Paul Wesley showed that a ring of charge circulating at light speed reproduces the electron's mass, charge, spin and magnetic moment, is stable under electromagnetic forces alone, and does not radiate.

From there the models were extended to the proton and neutron, to atomic and nuclear shell structure by Charles W. Lucas, Jr. and Joseph Lucas, and into the "helicon" synthesis of Common Sense Science. Related structural approaches include vortex models and Field Structure Theory.

The standing objection is experimental: high-energy scattering shows no electron substructure down to about 10^-20 m, far below the Compton-scale ring these models require.