The talk deals with two seemingly unrelated subjects.
a) The Dirac equation which is an accepted mathematical model for spin 1/2 particles such as the neutrino and the electron.
b) Cosserat elasticity, a generalisation of classical elasticity in which points of the elastic continuum are given rotational degrees of freedom.
The aim of the talk is to show that the Dirac equation is a special case of Cosserat elasticity, namely, that the Dirac equation describes an elastic continuum with no displacements, only rotations. This idea is not new: it lies at the heart of the theory of teleparallelism (= absolute parallelism = fernparallelismus) promoted by Einstein and Cartan in the end of the 1920s and rejected by the mainstream theoretical physics community. The new element is the choice of Lagrangian [1], one which is conformally invariant.
1. J. Burnett, O. Chervova and D. Vassiliev, Dirac equation as a special case of Cosserat elasticity, arXiv:0812.3948.