SYMMETRICAL UNIFICATION FROM ELECTROMAGNETOSTATICS .1.

Unification of all the physical forces, the subject of the Einstein Ce ntennial Symposium in Jerusalem (1979), is the most important, unresol ved problem in physics. It is intolerable that the unifying convergenc e of all running couplings towards the Planck limit should be based so lely on empirical data and the standard model of electroweak interacti ons. In 1915 Sommerfield and Wilson found that an electron, moving rel ativistically in an atomic Keplerian orbit, causes the perihelion of t he ellipse to precess at a rate determined by a nondimensional constan t alpha = e2/HBARc, the ratio of the velocity in the first Bohr orbit to that of light. Innumerable, unsuccessful attempts have since been m ade to derive this Sommerfeld fine-structure constant, alpha, from fir st principles. Most notable is the 1931 paper by Dirac, in which he fo und, instead, the charge quantization relation between electric and ma gnetic monopoles, virtually obtained earlier by J.J. Thomson, Poincare , and Planck. In developing an idea by J.J. Thomson (1895), apparently previously overlooked, we have found it possible to derive, in a virt ual energy coupling model, all the particle coupling constants, using nothing but nineteenth-century electromagnetostatics, after the Kelvin theories of images and inversion. The background, theory, computer pr ograms, and principal results are given, and various agreements with t he sparse data of running couplings demonstrated.