The Hand That Was Chosen: The V−A Structure, Priced

The weak interaction is left-handed, and it did not have to be. Of the five Lorentz structures a four-fermion interaction can wear — scalar, vector, tensor, axial, pseudoscalar — nature's weak current wears one chiral combination, V − A, with every fermion field entering through its left-handed projection only. In 1957–58, E. C. G. Sudarshan and R. E. Marshak, and independently R. P. Feynman and M. Gell-Mann, named that combination, and naming it built the modern weak theory: a universal current–current interaction, the muon spectrum fixed, maximal parity violation made structural. I credit the naming at full strength in this paper. What I price is how the combination was arrived at: it was chosen — selected against an experimental record its proponents themselves partly judged mistaken — and the papers admit the residue at exactly the points where a derivation would have to stand. Feynman and Gell-Mann's abstract, which I fetched and quote in this paper, states that the coupling's relative sign "is not determined theoretically," and that it "is taken to be 'universal'." My bench prices the choice's full empirical weight: one number (the Michel parameter, 0.750000 against the scalar counterfactual's 0.000000) carries its isotropic spectrum; one sign (±0.333333 of integrated asymmetry, against 0.000000 for a parity-conserving coupling) carries its handedness; the right-handed sector is excluded at exactly zero on a continuum where an admixture of 0.10 still returns 0.980198 of maximal asymmetry; and the one projection forces the pion's electronic decay down by a factor of 42753.1 against its unsuppressed counterfactual. Grade for this census entry, printed at full size: REASON FOUND / STILL TURNING — explicitly not a kill and not a falsification. The program headline stands unmoved: vacuum catastrophe NOT SOLVED / PARTIAL, producing-count 0.