The standard model invents virtual particles to explain results after they are found, like a toolbox that can produce any particle, so when anti-matter was discovered, it just added a new particle column, and when family generations were found, it just added new rows. When mesons were discovered, they were so unexpected that Nobel laureate Israel Rabi quipped “Who ordered that?”, but the standard model just called them bosons and carried on. When new facts arrive, the standard model accommodates them in its existing structure, or adds a new room.
Scientific theories should be falsifiable, but how can one falsify a model that absorbs rather than adds knowledge? It proposed gravitons that a long search hasn’t found, so was that a fail? It predicted proton decay, but twenty years of study pushed their lifetime to that of the universe, so was that a fail? It expected matter and anti-matter to exist in equal amounts, so is our universe of matter a fail? It expected massless neutrinos, until experiments found they had mass, and penta-quarks and strange quarks, until a two-decade search found neither, and the list goes on. It expected weakly interacting particles (WIMPs) to explain dark matter, but again a long search found nothing. The standard model is like a hydra, as when the facts cut off one head, it just grows another. What will it take to falsify a model whose failures are called unsolved problems in physics?
The standard model’s success is its ability to calculate results to many decimal places, but in science, accuracy isn’t validity. An equation that accurately interpolates between known data points isn’t a theory that extrapolates to new points. Equations are judged by accuracy but theories are judged by their predictions, yet today’s physicists, fed on equations not science (Kuhn, 1970), think they are the same. As Georgi said:
“Students should learn the difference between physics and mathematics from the start” (Woit,2007), p85.
The difference is that theories are based on validity, while equations are based on accuracy. A theory is valid if it is true, and no amount of accuracy can replace that, so if a model can’t predict, it doesn’t matter how accurate it is.
The standard model claims to have predicted top and charm quarks before they were found, but predicting quark generations after finding lepton generations is like predicting the last move in a tic-tac-toe game, inevitable. After all, it didn’t predict family generations in the first place. It also claims to have predicted gluons, weak particles, and the Higgs, but predicting what one invents isn’t prediction. Fitting equations to data then matching their terms to ephemeral flashes in accelerator events is like reading tea-leaves – look hard enough and you’ll find something, as according to Wyszkowski’s Second Law, anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.
The standard model’s reason why a top quark is 300,000 times heavier than an electron is because it is, so it is no surprise that what baffled physics fifty years ago still baffles it today. Equations don’t have to go beyond the data that made them, but theories do, so where are they? The answer is that only the standard model exists, and it isn’t producing any new knowledge. The last time such a barren model dominated thought so completely was before Newton.