There is a famous passage in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (6.54) in which he describes philosophy as a ladder. One climbs it to gain clarity — and once one has seen clearly, one must throw the ladder away.
I have always liked that image. Not because I am a philosopher — I am not — but because physics, too, is often a ladder-building exercise. We construct conceptual scaffolding to reach a clearer view of reality. And sometimes the scaffolding must be dismantled.
Over the past few years, my RealQM work has rested on a very concrete ontological picture: that elementary particles, and in particular the electron, are structured motion of a fundamental “naked charge.” This naked charge was assumed to be primitive, indestructible, and localized. Mass, spin, and magnetic moment were understood as emergent from its internal Zitterbewegung-like motion.
It was a satisfying picture. Clear. Realist. Concrete.
But there was always a tension: electron–positron annihilation.
If charge is a bead-like primitive, how can two such primitives simply disappear in free-space annihilation? Earlier I explored whether pair creation and annihilation might involve hidden nuclear accounting. That line of thought was not unreasonable. But experimental reality has priority over ontological preference. Free-space annihilation is real.
Accepting that fact forces a revision.
In my most recent paper — From Naked Charge to Conserved Current — I argue that electric charge is better understood not as an indestructible substance, but as the conserved Noether current associated with global U(1) symmetry. In that view, localized charges are stable current-carrying field configurations. Annihilation is not the disappearance of an essence, but the cancellation of opposite currents within a symmetry-constrained field.
This shift does not abandon realism. On the contrary, it grounds charge conservation more deeply — in symmetry rather than in bead-like primitives.
If Wittgenstein’s ladder applies here, then the “naked charge” was a rung. It allowed me to see clearly the necessity of a real, conserved structure underlying electromagnetic phenomena. But once the symmetry structure is understood — through Noether’s theorem — the bead-like picture becomes unnecessary.
One does not discard it with contempt. One simply no longer needs it. The ladder did its job.
The interesting thing, however, is that the new view is simpler, not more complicated. The primitive layer of physical description is not little charged beads hiding behind formalism, but symmetry of real dynamical fields. Charge persists not as substance, but as invariant structure.
For readers unfamiliar with Noether’s theorem, I have included a technical appendix in the paper deriving the conserved current explicitly. It is one of those rare pieces of mathematics that feels less like abstraction and more like clarity.
Physics is often described as replacing intuition with mathematics. In this case, it feels more like replacing one intuition with a deeper one. And that, perhaps, is what ladders are for.
Reading Feynman 