  The conventional explanation for the 1.022 MeV decay of positronium in terms
of the annihilation of an electron and its antiparticle is questioned because
of the impossibility of proving experimentally that matter actually disappears.
Recent work has provided evidence that photons are not destroyed in radiative
absorption, for example, but rather attain an undetectable (E=h(nu)=0) state.
Questioning the creation-annihilation hypothesis in the case of positronium
decay leads to the construction of an exponentially damped Breit-Pauli
Hamiltonian which when employed in a Schroedinger equation gives an e+e- ground
state with a binding energy of 1.022 MeV. The analogous treatment does not
produce any (unobserved) states of similarly low energy for the hydrogen atom,
but by virtue of a simple scaling theorem it does lead to a maximal
proton-antiproton binding energy of 1.876 GeV, which is exactly mp/me times
larger than for e+e-. Arguments are presented to identify the resulting tightly
bound e+ e- system with the photon itself, since both are ascribed a zero rest
mass. The above Hamiltonian is identified with the unified electroweak
interaction, especially since it also proves applicable to the description of
neutrino processes. It is pointed out that the analogous (nu)(bar nu) binary
systems would be subject to predissociation into free neutrinos and
antineutrinos, however, unlike their much more strongly bound e+ e- and p+ p-
counterparts. This observation suggests a different explanation for the
well-known solar neutrino problem than the flavor-oscillation theory which has
been proposed earlier.
