In the apocryphal story, a frog dropped in a pan of hot water jumps out immediately but if put in tepid water that is slowly heated, by the time it realizes the danger it is too weak to jump out and perishes. It is now proposed that the standard model did something similar to the science of physics last century.
Faraday’s proposal that electric fields affected charges from afar was initially considered fanciful because it was a disembodied force acting at a distance, and Newton had already rejected this for gravity:
“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.
Likewise, charge effects had to be caused by a physical agent. Maxwell then developed the equations of electro-magnetism by imagining physical ball-bearings twisting in vortex tubes, but later attempts to develop this into a physical model failed. To resolve this quandary, field theory proposed that field-created particles moved charges in an electric field, and as Maxwell’s equations acted in photon units, they were taken to be the force-carriers of electro-magnetism.
The standard model was then born, when it attributed electro-magnetic effects to photons from a Faraday field. Unlike real photons, these photons couldn’t be observed, as they are consumed by the effect they cause, so they were called virtual photons. This worked nicely, so no-one worried that a cause had been assumed after an effect, but since this cause predicted nothing new, the pseudo-science temperature had just gone up a notch.
The strength of science is based on its power to predict physical events not its equations, because equations aren’t theories. Theories increase knowledge but equations just summarize what we know already, so equation results aren’t new predictions. And since virtual photons didn’t predict anything else that was new, the science of physics was made weaker.
Even so, the standard model then generalized that since photons are bosons, all fields act by boson agents, so gravity had to work by gravitons that to this day have no physical equivalent. There is no evidence at all that such particles have ever existed, but the standard model says they cause gravity. And since they predict nothing new about gravity, again the pseudo-science temperature went up.
Buoyed by its acceptance, the standard model then proposed that protons were held together in the atomic nucleus by a strong field that created virtual gluons with a color charge, so now it had a field that created charge. Yet again, this added nothing to our knowledge of the nucleus, so again the pseudo-science temperature increased.
Explaining why neutrons decay in empty space was more of a challenge, as it needed a weak field to produce virtual agents with charge and mass, unlike virtual photons that have neither mass or charge. Some evidence was needed, so resonances from billions of transient accelerator events were examined, and when compatible ones were found, W-bosons were declared to exist. The equations then implied that protons decay like neutrons, but they don’t, so this failure to predict weakened the science of physics yet again.
Finally, the standard model had to explain how a field could create mass, so its answer was yet another field, this time with a virtual particle so massive that only a billion-dollar accelerator could 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.
This statement sounds good but doesn’t mention that the elementary particles it refers to are virtual! Physics has pasted field upon field to prove Newton’s belief, until now virtual particles pop in and out of space to cause every effect. They are said to be everywhere, making everything happen, but what have they added to the science of physics? The answer, honestly, is not much, as they either predict wrongly or not at all.
Virtual particles are the scientific version of a blank check, whose amount can be filled in after it is known. Every new virtual cause the standard model invented weakened physics until, like the frog in the pan, it is now in danger of dying as a science. Yet the modern age of fairy-tale physics (Baggot, 2013) was created one fairy at a time, by the scientists themselves.