Ideas on charm and beauty decays

The parton model, a zero-order approximation in many treatments, is shown to be a ``semiclassical" model whose results for certain averages also hold (correspondence principle) in quantum mechanics. Algebraic techniques developed for the M\"ossbauer effect exploit simple features of commutators to obtain sum rules showing the validity of the parton model for $b \rightarrow c$ semileptonic decays in the classical limit, $\hbar \rightarrow 0$, where all commutators vanish, and in general, even when binding effects are included, for the lowest moments of the lepton energy spectrum at fixed 3-momentum transfer. Interference between the $u \bar u$ and $d \bar d$ components of the $\rho^o$ and $\omega$ wave functions can be used as clues to contributions from small weak amplitudes and CP violation in decays to final states including these vector mesons.