In a well-known story, a frog put in a pan of hot water jumps out immediately but if put in tepid water that is slowly heated, doesn’t realize the danger and perishes. It isn’t literally true, but illustrates how a gradually changing environment can prove fatal if unrecognized. For example, over centuries the natives of Easter Island cut down the trees on their island until their community collapsed but why did they, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree? The theory of creeping normality suggests they didn’t see their environment degrade because it was gradual (Diamond, 2005). It is now argued that particle physics is now stagnant because it did the same thing to its scientific environment.
That Faraday’s electric fields move charges from afar was at first considered fanciful because it was a disembodied force acting at a distance. Newton’s argument that gravity needs a particle agent was:
“That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro’ a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else … is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man … can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent…” (Oerter, 2006), p17.
Hence, the attraction and repulsion of charges was thought to also need a physical agent.
Maxwell developed his equations of electro-magnetism by imagining physical ball-bearings twisting in vortex tubes, but later attempts to develop a physical model from this failed. It was then proposed that electro-magnetic effects occurred in photon units because photons were the force-carriers of electro-magnetism.
The standard model began when charge effects were attributed to photons from the electro-magnetic field. They weren’t observable like real photons, because their effect consumed them, so they were called virtual photons. They justified the equations, so no-one noticed the effect on the scientific environment of assuming a cause that wasn’t falsifiable or productive. The strength of science is its ability to explain, so assuming what doesn’t explain more weakened it. It was bad science, so the scientific environment of particle physics was degraded.
Buoyed by its acceptance, the standard model then argued that all fields are the same, so gravity was caused by gravitons that to this day have no observed basis. There is no evidence at all that they exist, and they predict nothing new about gravity so again, particle physics became scientifically weaker.
The standard model then proposed that a strong field held together the atomic nucleus by creating gluons with a color charge, so it now had a field that created charge. Again, gluons added nothing to our knowledge of the nucleus so again, the scientific background was degraded further.
Explaining why neutrons decay in space was more challenging, as now a field had to produce particles with charge and mass. Some evidence was needed, so billions of accelerator events were examined and when compatible resonances were found, weak particles were declared to exist. This predicted that protons will decay like neutrons but they don’t, so the science of particle physics weakened again.
Finally, the standard model had to explain how a field could create mass. Its answer was of course yet another field, with a virtual particle so massive that needed a billion-dollar accelerator to justify it. All to support Newton’s canon that:
“…the forces of Nature are deeply entwined with the elementary particles of Nature.” (Barrow, 2007), p97.
It sounds good but the elementary particles it refers to are virtual not real. The standard model has pasted field upon field to prove Newton’s belief in particles, so now virtual particles pop out of space to cause every effect. They are said to make everything happen but what did they add to knowledge? The brutal fact is that they either predict wrongly or add nothing at all.
A new field is the scientific version of a blank check whose amount is filled in after it is known, so adding fields to space was a failure of science not a success of physics. Theories that aren’t even wrong (Woit, 2006) have produced what some call fairy-tale physics (Baggot, 2013). If so, it was created one fairy at a time, by the physicists themselves.