New approaches to unified field theory

Trying to understand the origin of the internal symmetry and of the Fermi and scalar fields that enter a gauge theory of fundamental interactions, one is led to Guersey's magic symmetries and to supergauge theories. The latter suggest that all fields of the gauge theory (gluons, quarks, weak gauge fields, scalars, etc.) correspond to collective excitations. A subquark model is then explored. There the weak and electromagnetic interactions (at low energies) are found to be weaker than color gauge interactions essentially because there are more flavors than colors. Recent work on color confinement is briefly reviewed