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.
A Small Clarification
After publishing the paper, I realized that the shift in my thinking can be stated even more simply.
In earlier work, I treated the “naked charge” as a primitive bead-like entity — something that exists independently and permanently, and whose motion generates mass, spin, and magnetic moment.
What I am now prepared to accept is much more modest. Charge can be understood as a localized source (or sink) term in the electromagnetic field equations. Opposite source and sink can superpose and cancel. Nothing “mystical” happens; the field configuration simply evolves according to its dynamical laws.
This does not mean that charge is unreal or merely a bookkeeping device. It remains a real source term in Maxwell’s equations and a real conserved quantity obeying the continuity equation. What disappears in annihilation is not an indestructible primitive, but a localized source–sink configuration.
In that sense, the shift is smaller than it may appear. I have not abandoned realism. I have simply abandoned the idea that charge must be a bead-like ontological atom.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Reading Feynman 
There is a fascinating history of this question. I recommend Vladimir P. Vizgin’s book “Unified field theories in the first third of the 20th century” and Hubert F. M. Goenner’s text “On the history of unified field theories.” The (original) non-linear Born-Infeld field theory and model of electrons goes a long way towards answering the question.
If the question is whether there are nonlinear generalizations of classical electrodynamics that include rotating field solutions with properties of electrons, I hope and assume that the answer is “yes”. My best guess is a modified Born-Infeld field theory.
Good luck with your research!
Thank you very much for these references — both Vizgin and Goenner look like valuable historical maps of earlier unified field efforts. I much appreciate the pointers – hadn’t heard of them before, to be honest. I quickly googled a bit, and have following quick observations:
1. Born–Infeld is of course particularly interesting because of its original motivation: finite self-energy and the possibility of modeling charged particles as localized field configurations. That clearly intersects with one of the open questions I listed.
2. For the moment, however, my own shift is deliberately modest. I am not yet invoking new fields or nonlinear generalizations beyond classical electromagnetism. The conceptual move I am exploring is simply this: replacing bead-like “naked charge” ontology with a source–sink interpretation within existing field equations and symmetry structure. That already resolves the annihilation tension without multiplying entities.
3. Whether nonlinear extensions such as Born–Infeld provide a deeper dynamical realization of stable charged configurations is certainly worth studying — but I would prefer to examine that carefully rather than prematurely expanding the framework.
Thanks again for the thoughtful suggestions. I hope you understand my ‘limitations’ ! 🙂
Having worked with non-linear electrodynamics for a few years, I very much understand your reluctance to get into it! However, I’m afraid the non-linearity is very much a “baked-in” part of the electromagnetic worldview of particles as field configurations. The reason is a feature of (homogeneous) linear field theories: the superposition principle, which says that any linear combination (i.e. any weighted sum) of two solutions of (homogeneous) linear field equations is again a solution to these linear field equations. Thus, if you have one particle-like field solution of a (homogeneous) linear field theory (like standard electrodynamics in vacuum) and another field solution with a uniform E-field (a very boring static solution to the field equations, but a solution nonetheless), the sum of these two solutions (particle and uniform E-field) is again a solution. And this means, that a uniform E-field is in no way influencing the particle-like field solution, i.e. the particle is not being accelerated by the uniform E-field (as a charged particle should be). In general, there is no “interaction” between any two solutions of (homogeneous) linear field theories due to the superposition principle. Huygens Optics has made a nice YouTube video “Turning Waves Into Particles” where he addressed this lack of interaction in any linear medium.
That being said, working with solutions of non-linear field equations is very difficult. (I can barely compute the ground state of a resting particle with my field simulation.) However, I believe that the electromagnetic worldview as a conceptual background to a Zitter model of electrons is extremely useful. A Zitter model then plays the role of an approximation to (or effective model of) a particle-like solution of non-linear field equations, and several mysterious features of Zitter models are much more easily understood based on features of such particle-like solutions.
And simulating Zitter models is a lot easier than simulating non-linear field equations; therefore, one can simulate much more interesting physical scenarios with Zitter models. That’s why my focus changed from non-linear field theories to Zitter models. Thus, I have fully embraced some of those “limitations” myself – and for good reasons!
Thanks for your understanding ! 🙂 I just only now clicked on your profile – and got directed to your vixra.org papers: impressive ! As for the term ‘Zitterbewegung’, I distanced myself a bit from that – not because it isn’t right but because I realized the term or theory did create some kind of new ‘tribe’ which did not really manage to come together on some kind of unified ‘body of assumptions’. See: https://readingfeynman.org/2025/05/17/taking-stock-zitterbewegung-electron-models-and-the-role-of-ai-in-thinking-clearly/ . In any case, that is surely not meant to discourage you – on the contrary ! Keep thinking !!! 🙂
Thank you! There are certainly enough open questions to keep thinking. And I’m very curious to see where your RealQM work will lead you next!