In an old story, a frog put in a pan of hot water jumps out immediately, but if put in tepid water that is slowly heated, it doesn’t realize the danger and perishes. It isn’t literally true, but it illustrates how a gradual background change can prove fatal if unrecognized. For example over centuries, the natives of Easter Island cut down the trees their community depended on until it collapsed, but why did they, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree? Diamond’s theory of creeping normality suggests they didn’t see the background change because it was gradual (Diamond, 2005). The same effect could explain the current stagnation of particle physics, except their background was science not the 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 all later attempts to develop a physical model failed, so it was proposed that field effects were caused by created particles, and as they occurred in photon units, photons were taken to be the force-carriers of electro-magnetism.
The standard model was born 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. Particles made the equations work but no-one noticed the background effect on science, of assuming a cause that wasn’t falsifiable or productive. This was bad science so the scientific foundation of particle physics became weaker. The strength of science is its ability to explain more, so doing the opposite, assuming what doesn’t explain more, made it weaker.
Buoyed by apparent success, the standard model then generalized that all fields work the same way, so it attributed gravity to gravitons that to this day have no physical equivalent. There is no evidence at all that they exist, and they predict nothing new about gravity, so again, particle physics became weaker.
The standard model then proposed that a strong field held together the atomic nucleus by creating virtual gluons with a color charge. It now had a field that created charge but again, gluons added nothing to our knowledge of the nucleus, so again, the scientific background was weakened further.
Explaining why neutrons decay in empty 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 time, it predicted that protons decay like neutrons, but they don’t, so the science of particle physics became even weaker.
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 the virtual ones of the standard model. 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 be everywhere, making everything happen, but what do they add to our knowledge? The answer, honestly, is not much, as they either predict wrongly or add nothing at all.
A new field is the scientific version of a blank check, whose amount can be filled in after it is known, so adding fields to space was a failure of science not a success of physics. It produces what is not even wrong (Woit, 2006), to give what has been called fairy-tale physics (Baggot, 2013). If so, it was created one fairy at a time, by physicists themselves, albeit unknowingly.