Schwinger's Magnetic Model of Matter: Can It Help Us With Grand Unification?

Many have argued that research on grand unification or local realistic physics will not be truly relevant until it makes predictions verified by experiment, different from the prediction of prior theory (the standard model). This paper proposes a new strategy (and candidate Lagrangians) for such models; that strategy in turn calls for reconsideration of Schwinger's magnetic model of matter. High priority should be given to experiments which fully confirm or deny recent scattering calculations which suggest the presence of van der Waals effects in low energy p-p and pi-pi scattering, consistent with Schwinger's model and inconsistent with QCD as we know it (with a mass gap). I briefly discuss other evidence, which does not yet rule out Schwinger's theory. A recent analysis of hadron masses also seems more consistent with the Schwinger model than with QCD.