Standard Model

Scientific Theory
Name	Standard Model
Type	Quantum field theory of elementary particles and three of the four forces
Author(s)	Developed collectively, 1961–1975; Glashow, Weinberg, Salam, Gell-Mann, 't Hooft, Veltman and others
Keywords	Particle Physics, quarks, leptons, gauge bosons, Higgs boson, quantum field theory, Quantum Theory
Year	1970s (established); Higgs boson confirmed 2012

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Wikipedia Dispute: wikipedia:Standard Model

This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Standard Model

The Standard Model is the currently accepted theory of elementary particles and of three of the four known forces. It is the framework taught in every physics department and assumed by every particle-physics experiment, and it is the target of a large body of criticism on this wiki. This article sets out what the Standard Model claims, why mainstream physics holds it in such high regard, and then what the researchers catalogued here say is wrong with it and what they propose instead.

What the Standard Model says

Particle content

The Standard Model holds that all matter is built from seventeen kinds of fundamental particle, each treated as a point with no size and no internal structure:

Six quarks — up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom — which combine in threes to make protons and neutrons, and in pairs to make mesons. Quarks carry fractional electric charge and a further property called colour charge.
Six leptons — the electron, muon and tau, each with an associated neutrino.
Four gauge bosons — the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z — which carry the forces.
The Higgs boson, whose associated field is held to give the other particles their mass.

The twelve matter particles fall into three "generations" of increasing mass with otherwise identical properties. Ordinary matter uses only the first.

Forces

Three forces are described, each as an exchange of gauge bosons:

Electromagnetism, mediated by the photon;
the strong force, mediated by gluons, which binds quarks into protons and neutrons and holds nuclei together;
the weak force, mediated by the W and Z, responsible for beta decay.

Gravity is not included. The Standard Model makes no statement about it, and no accepted quantum theory of gravity exists.

Why it is held in such high regard

The case for the Standard Model is that it predicted things that were subsequently found, and that it computes some quantities to an accuracy unmatched anywhere in science:

The W and Z bosons were predicted and then observed at CERN in 1983 at close to the predicted masses.
The charm, bottom and top quarks were predicted before discovery, the top being found in 1995.
The Higgs boson, proposed in 1964, was found at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron is calculated and measured in agreement to roughly twelve significant figures — the most precisely verified prediction in physical science.

Any alternative account has to reckon with this record. It is the reason the Standard Model is not going to be displaced by argument alone.

Criticisms

The objections raised by researchers on this wiki are not, for the most part, that the Standard Model computes the wrong numbers. They are that it computes the right numbers without explaining anything — and that several of its features look less like discoveries about nature than like devices introduced to keep the framework working.

Points cannot have properties

The most persistent objection concerns the point particle. The electron is assigned a size of exactly zero, yet is also said to possess mass, charge, spin and a magnetic moment. Critics here argue that these are properties only an extended object can have: spin is rotation, and a point cannot rotate; a magnetic moment implies a current loop, and a point encloses no area. To attribute them to a dimensionless point, Glen C Collins wrote, is to ascribe physical properties to an abstraction and then decline to explain them — the accounts offered are, in his phrase, "just stories."

A related and much older problem is that nobody can say why a point charge does not explode under its own Coulomb repulsion. The Standard Model's response is to declare the question ill-posed rather than answer it.

Free parameters

The Standard Model contains roughly nineteen adjustable constants — particle masses, coupling strengths, mixing angles — that are not predicted by the theory but measured and inserted by hand, rising to about twenty-six once neutrino masses are included. None of the particle masses is derived. Critics argue that a theory requiring two dozen fitted inputs is a parameterization of the data rather than an explanation of it, and note that several alternatives on this wiki claim to derive particle masses from a much smaller set of constants.

Unobserved and unobservable entities

Quarks are never seen in isolation. The property invoked to account for this — confinement — is, on the critical reading, an explanation constructed specifically to excuse the absence of the evidence that would otherwise be required. Alexander Unzicker, a physicist and author of Bankrupting Physics and The Higgs Fake, argues that much of modern particle physics has been invention rather than discovery: that the particle zoo grew by postulating new entities whenever the accounts failed, and that the resulting structure is unfalsifiable in practice.

Gravity, dark matter and dark energy

The Standard Model omits gravity entirely. Taken together with cosmology, it also leaves roughly 95% of the universe unaccounted for, made up by dark matter and dark energy, neither of which has been detected directly. Critics regard this as a straightforward indication that something foundational is wrong, rather than as a research programme in good standing.

Mathematics in place of mechanism

Underlying the specific complaints is a methodological one. The researchers catalogued here hold that a physical theory should say what things are and by what mechanism they act — that every effect should have an identifiable physical cause, and that a model which cannot be pictured has not yet explained anything. On this view the Standard Model, whatever its predictive success, describes behaviour without describing reality. As David L Bergman put it, a "Great Error" occurred when physicists abandoned physical models and "embraced abstraction as if the abstraction itself were reality."

Alternatives on this wiki

The alternatives fall into recognizable families. Almost all of them share one premise: that particles are real objects with real extent, and that their properties should follow from that structure rather than being assigned to them.

Wave models: Energy Wave Theory

Energy Wave Theory (EWT), developed by Jeff Yee, treats the universe as a physical medium — an aether — and holds that everything described as a particle, mass, charge or force is a consequence of wave behaviour in that medium, computed with ordinary classical mechanics.

Its two structural claims are that matter is standing waves — a particle is a region where travelling longitudinal waves are reflected by wave centers, forming a standing wave whose stored energy is its mass and whose decay radius is its edge — and that forces are wave interference, with the strong, electromagnetic and gravitational forces governed by one equation and differing only in wave form and amplitude, because particles move toward the point of minimal amplitude.

The contrast with the Standard Model is sharpest on parameters. Where the Standard Model measures and inserts around nineteen constants, Yee's stated aim is that the energies of all particles and the strengths of three forces follow from four constants of the medium plus one property of the electron — the electron's ten wave centers. Photons in this scheme are transverse waves in the same medium, so particles and photons obey a single wave equation and differ only in form.

EWT descends from the Wave Structure of Matter tradition of Milo M Wolff, who modelled the electron as spherical in-waves and out-waves about a wave center, and Gabriel LaFreniere, whose simulations gave the picture visual form.

Particle collision models: the Four Universal Motions

The Four Universal Motions in Physics, by Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster, takes the opposite tack from the wave models and is more radical in its economy. It proposes that light, gravity, magnetism and electricity are all the same particle travelling at the speed of light, and that the forces we observe are the results of the different ways that particle moves — gravitic, magnetic, luminic and electric motion.

Gravitic motion, the most basic, is random motion: space is filled with vast numbers of small fast bodies travelling in straight lines in random directions, and gravity is the push that results when two bodies partly shadow one another from that flux. Inertia is reinterpreted in the same terms — a moving body keeps moving because random impacts sustain it. The model claims to describe all forces physically and visually, without fields, wave–particle duality or action at a distance.

It extends the earlier Particle Model of the same authors, and is set out in Principia Mathematica 2. Where the Standard Model has seventeen particles and four forces, this has one particle and four motions.

Structural models: rings, knots and fieldstructures

A third family gives particles definite geometry.

Common Sense Science — David L Bergman, Charles W. Lucas, Jr., Thomas G Barnes, Glen C Collins — models the electron as a spinning charged ring of circulating charge, in the tradition of Parson's 1915 magneton and Arthur Holly Compton. The model is claimed to reproduce mass, charge, spin and magnetic moment, to be stable under electromagnetic forces alone, and to yield the gyromagnetic ratio of 2 rather than postulating it. Joseph C Lucas extended it to atomic and nuclear shells, deriving the sequence 2, 8, 18, 32 from geometric packing.
Field Structure Theory — Don Briddell — builds particles from loops, twists and knots in a plenum, with mass values generated by a Sierpinski fractal hierarchy of loop counts.
Wladimir Guglinski's Quantum Ring Theory and Leo Vuyk's Quantum Function Follows Form propose further geometric particle structures.
Thomas N Lockyer and Osvaldo Domann have each developed structural accounts of particles and nuclei outside the quark model.

Relativistic alternatives: Autodynamics

Autodynamics, developed by Ricardo L. Carezani and promoted by the Society for the Advancement of Autodynamics, attacks the Standard Model at a specific point: it holds that the neutrino does not exist, having been invented only to preserve energy conservation in the relativistic treatment of beta decay, and claims to describe beta decay without it. It also replaces relativistic mass increase with mass decrease and models gravity by a hypothetical picograviton.

Critics without a replacement

Not every critic offers a substitute. Alexander Unzicker works within mainstream physics as a trained physicist, and his objection is methodological: that fundamental physics lost its way when it abandoned the questions posed by Mach, Dirac, Sciama and Dicke, and that the modern field mistakes mathematical elaboration for understanding. His books argue the case at length without proposing a rival particle model.

Common threads

Different as these programmes are — waves against particles, rings against knots — they converge on a small number of shared commitments, and it is worth naming them because they mark the real dividing line with the Standard Model:

Particles have extent. Every alternative here rejects the point particle.
Fewer inputs. Each claims to derive from a handful of constants what the Standard Model measures and inserts.
One medium, or one particle. Unification is sought by reducing the ontology rather than by adding gauge groups.
Mechanism over formalism. A force must act by something, at some speed, through something.
Gravity included. Every programme here treats gravity as part of the same account, rather than as a separate and unsolved problem.

The corresponding challenge, which readers should hold these programmes to as firmly as they hold the Standard Model, is the record set out above: no alternative on this wiki has yet reproduced the electron's anomalous magnetic moment to twelve significant figures, nor predicted a particle later found at the predicted mass. Scattering experiments continue to show no electron substructure down to about 10^-20 m, some seven orders of magnitude below the size that most structural models require.