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August 17, 2026

Three Generations in E7

Posted by John Baez

It’s long been a mystery why there are 3 generations of quarks and leptons: three sets of particles, apparently identical except for how they interact with the Higgs boson. It would be nice if there were some good physical explanation. Nobody knows one. Barring that, it would be nice if some beautiful mathematical structure made this pattern seem natural. That’s what my new paper is about.

I’ll keep this nontechnical. I’ll say a bit about what the paper does, what it does not do, what led up to it, and how I wrote it.

Continue reading “Three Generations in E7” …
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