Occam’s razor, not to multiply causes unnecessarily, is the pruning hook of science, but the standard model did the opposite. Physics started with a simple theory of mass, charge, and spin, but now it has isospin, hypercharge, color, chirality, flavor, and other esoteric features. The standard model today needs sixty-two fundamental particles (Note 1), five invisible fields, sixteen charges and fourteen bosons to work (Table 4.6). If it was a machine, one would have to hand-set over two dozen knobs just right for it to light up, so if this model is preferred today, it isn’t because of its simplicity.
For this level of complexity, one might expect completeness, but the standard model is far from that. It can’t explain gravity, proton stability, anti-matter, quark charges, neutrino mass, neutrino spin, family generations, randomness, or why inflation stopped. Nor does it say anything about the dark energy or dark matter that constitute 95% of the universe. Its main feature is that with each new result, it grows, so to explain inflation needs a hypothetical symmetron field, and to explain the mass of neutrinos needs another 7-8 arbitrary constants:
Good theories grow new data, as a garden grows plants, but the standard model absorbs new data to grow itself. It is the magic castle that spawned the fairy-like virtual particles that led modern physics nowhere, because multiplying causes unnecessarily is against science.
Note1. Two leptons with three generations plus anti-matter variants is 12. Two quarks with three generations plus anti-matter variants and three colors is 36. Plus one photon, eight gluons, three weak bosons, one graviton and the Higgs is another 14. The total is 62.