ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts, as in the global symmetry scheme, to treat the eight known baryons as a supermultiplet, degenerate in the limit of a certain symmetry but split into isotopic spin multiplets by a symmetry-breaking term. It ascribes the symmetry violation phenomenologically to the mass differences themselves, supposing that there is some analogy to the mass difference. The chapter explores the "eightfold way" by discussing unitary symmetry using fictitious "leptons" which may have nothing to do with real leptons but help to fix the physical ideas in a rather graphic way. It discusses the unitary symmetry with "leptons", although the theory really concerns the baryons and mesons and the strong interactions. There are trilinear and quadrilinear interactions amongst the vector mesons, as usual, and also trilinear and quadrilinear couplings with the pseudoscalar mesons. All these, along with the basic coupling of vector mesons to the baryons, are characterized in the limit of no mass differences by the single coupling parameter.
