Relativistic Vortices and Strings
L. M. Pismen · 1999
Abstract The ultimate unconventional superfluid is vacuum with a broken symmetry, the nonlinear medium of the field theory. More than a century ago, long before the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics, Lord Kelvin (Thomson, 1910) envisioned elementary particles as excitations of vortices in ether. After being abolished by modern physics, the ether was reincarnated in postmodernity as the field-theoretical vacuum, which, far from being void, is envisaged as a nonlinear medium of a complex, and as yet unknown, nature. The structure of vacuum may hold the key to the structure of both elementary particles and the Universe as a whole.