SU(8) family unification with boson-fermion balance

<!--HTML-->Grand unification has been intensively investigated for over forty years, and many different approaches have been tried. In this talk I propose a model that involves three ingredients that do not appear in the usual constructions: (1) boson--fermion balance without full supersymmetry, (2) canceling the spin 1/2 fermion gauge anomalies against the anomaly from a gauged spin 3/2 gravitino, and (3) using a scalar field representation with non-zero U(1) generator to break the SU(8) gauge symmetry through a ground state which, before dynamical symmetry breaking, has a periodic U(1) generator structure. The model has a number of promising features: (1) natural incorporation of three families, (2) incorporation of the experimentally viable flipped SU(5) model, (3) a symmetry breaking pathway to the standard model using the scalar field required by boson-fermion balance, together with a stage of most attractive channel dynamical symmetry breaking, without postulating additional Higgs fields, (4) vanishing of bare Yukawa couplings, which keeps the spin 1/2 fermions massless after SU(8) symmetry breaking, and together with zero gauge coupling supersymmetries may improve the predictive power of the theory.