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Re: Dyons, Dirac & Schwinger (was: EPSILON_ZERO, OK ?)



David is quite right in his corrections. I also said "Bohr-Stoner" when
I meant, of course, "Bohr-Sommerfeld". I also meant to say integrate
"rxp = rx(ExH) dV" instead of "ExB dV" but I made one change and failed
to finish the expression. I am now searching the preprint archive for a
reference which cites the original paper from Science I mentioned. I am
unsure it was by Dirac even; perhaps it was Schwinger. Anyway, I see
that "dyon" is now a standard word in the hep-th lexicon! It is amazing
to me that physics is now so compartmented that I hadn't run into that
before.

Aha! My search has been rewarded. I found a paper (among many others)
with "dyon" in its title which cites: P.A.M. Dirac, Proc. R. Soc. London
A133 (1931) 60; J. Schwinger, Phys. Rev. D12 10 (1975) 3105. This leads
me to believe that Schwinger likely coined the term. According to the
paper containing this citation (hep-th/0003003) the term now refers to
"particles which carry electric and magnetic charge", but I don't recall
that meaning from Schwinger's paper. I don't own a copy of Jackson (!)
but I suspect that Schwinger is cited there, too.

I found it! J. Schwinger, A Magnetic Model of Matter, Science 165 (1969)
757-761. As I recall it was a very easy article to read, though I forgot
the part about dyons bearing both kinds of charge. I can't magically
call up this article (I threw out my collection of Science twenty years
ago when I moved to my present house and gave up my membership in AAAS).
If someone knows how to access an archive of Science I would love to
learn about it.

I think that all of what I have written that was wrong is now fixed, and
thanks to the magic world in which we now live I have been able to
repair my memory and, perhaps, even expand it a bit.

Leigh