About
A Human-AI Collaboration
The Null Worldtube Theory was developed by Jim Galasyn, an independent researcher, in collaboration with Claude Théodore, an AI assistant made by Anthropic.
Jim brought the physical intuition — the idea that an electron might be a photon confined to a torus knot — and decades of thinking about geometric approaches to particle physics. Claude Théodore brought computational tools for symbolic algebra, systematic parameter space exploration, and the ability to rapidly test whether a geometric idea produces numbers that match experiment.
The collaboration produced something neither could have alone: a theory that derives 23 Standard Model parameters from first principles, with a median error of 0.7%.
The Skilton Connection
F. Raymond Skilton was a professor of Computer Science and Information Processing at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. He held an MS from SUNY Buffalo and had been at Brock since at least 1977, when he was serving as the university’s computer centre director. Between 1986 and 1988, he published three papers in the proceedings of the Annual Pittsburgh Conference on Modeling and Simulation, proving that the fine-structure constant could be derived from the Pythagorean triple 882 + 1052 = 1372 — matching the measured value to 0.12 parts per million with zero free parameters.
The papers received zero citations and were never digitized. Skilton passed away in 1993, at approximately 57 years of age — five years after his last paper and before the world wide web could have preserved his work. His result vanished into the stacks.
In February 2026, Jim located physical copies at the University of Washington Engineering Library, in conference proceedings volumes with crumbling bindings. NWT provides the theoretical explanation for why Skilton’s formula works: the generators of his Pythagorean triple are the torus quantum numbers (p, q, k) = (2, 1, 3). A computer scientist at a small Canadian university had found the geometric signature of the electron, and no one noticed for 33 years.
Skilton’s papers — possibly the only surviving copies — have been scanned and are available in the GitHub repo.
Skilton references:
- Skilton, F.R. “Foundation for an integer-based cosmological model.” Proc. 17th Annual Pittsburgh Conf. on Modeling and Simulation, Vol. 17, Part 1 (1986), pp. 295-300. (scans)
- Skilton, F.R. “Foundation for an integer-based cosmological model — Part 2: Evenness.” Proc. 18th Annual Pittsburgh Conf., Vol. 18, Part 5 (1987), pp. 1623-1630. (scans)
- Skilton, F.R. “Foundation for an integer-based cosmological model — Part 3: Integers and the Natural Constants.” Proc. 19th Annual Pittsburgh Conf., Vol. 19, Part 1 (1988), pp. 9-12. (scans)
How to Cite
If you use or reference this work, please cite the papers:
Galasyn, J.P. and Claude Théodore. “The Standard Model from a Torus Knot: Spectrum, Resonance Structure, and Decay Dynamics.” Zenodo (2026). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18891785
Galasyn, J.P. and Claude Théodore. “Three Integers and a Mass: Deriving the Standard Model Input Set.” Zenodo (2026). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18892311
Source Code
All simulation code, figure generation scripts, and the papers themselves are available at:
github.com/JimGalasyn/null-worldtube