Speculations Concerning Large-Angle Meson-Nucleon Scattering at High Energies

We conjecture that under certain conditions the amplitude of meson-nucleon scattering at high energies and large angles is determined by the equal-time commutator of the meson source densities. Guessing the form of the commutator in question, we find in particular that the $\pi N$ elastic-scattering amplitude is proportional to the isoscalar magnetic form factor of the nucleon. We propose a method to evaluate the experimental data in order to test asymptotic formulas of the type derived in this paper. Data on ${\pi }^{-}p$ scattering at $p_{\mathrm{lab}}=12\mathrm{} \frac{\mathrm{GeV}}{c}$ taken from Orear et al. are found to be compatible with the theoretical prediction.