This five-pager has it: all you ever wanted to know about the Universe. Electron mass and proton mass are seen as input to the model. To the most famous failed experiment in all of classical physics – the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, which disproved aether theories and established the absoluteness of lightspeed – we should add the Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment, which firmly established that protons do not decay. All the rest is history. 🙂
Post scriptum (26 April): I added another five-pager on fundamental concepts on ResearchGate, which may or may not help to truly understand what might be the case (I am paraphrasing Wittgenstein’s definition of reality here). It is on potentials, and it explains why thinking in terms of neat 1/r or 1/r2 functions is not all that helpful: reality is fuzzier than that. Even a simple electrostatic potential may be not very simple. The fuzzy concept of near and far fields remains useful.
I am actually very happy with the paper, because it sort of ‘completes’ my thinking on elementary particles in terms of ring currents. It made me feel like it is the first time I truly understand the complementarity/uncertainty principle – and that I invoke it to make an argument.
Reading Feynman 