The Substandard Model Of Particle Physics
The Standard Model of particle physics is our best conventional model for what is going on at subatomic scales. However, here are a few well-known problems with the SM.
1. The Standard Model is primarily a heuristic model with 26–30 fundamental parameters that have to be “put in by hand”.
2. The Standard Model did not and cannot predict the masses of the fundamental particles that make up all of the luminous matter that we can observe. QCD still cannot retrodict the mass of the proton without considerable fudging, and even then it is only good to within 5%. As for retrodicting the mass of the electron, the SM cannot even make an attempt.
3. The Standard Model did not and cannot predict the existence of the dark matter that constitutes the overwhelming majority of matter in the cosmos. The Standard Model describes heuristically the “foam on top of the ocean”.
4. The vacuum energy density crisis clearly suggests a fundamental flaw at the very heart of particle physics. The VED crisis involves the fact that the vacuum energy densities predicted by particle physicists (microcosm) and measured by cosmologists (macrocosm) differ by up to 120 orders of magnitude (roughly 10⁷⁰ to 10¹²⁰, depending on how one ‘guess-timates’ the particle physics VED).
5. The conventional Planck mass is highly unnatural, i.e., it bears no relation to any particle observed in nature, and calls into question the foundations of the quantum chromodynamics sector of the Standard Model.
6. Quantum chromodynamics naturally leads to the expectation of an electric dipole moment for the neutron on the order of 10^–16 e cm. However, experimental tests of this prediction find no neutron EDM down to ~ 10^–26 e cm. The QCD prediction for the nEDM fails by a factor of 10 billion! This is the well-known strong CP problem.
7. Many of the key particles of the Standard Model have never been directly observed. Rather, their existence is inferred from secondary, or more likely, tertiary decay products. Quantum chromodynamics is entirely built on inference, conjecture and speculation. It is too complex for simple definitive predictions and testing.
8. The standard model of particle physics cannot include the most fundamental and well-tested interaction of the cosmos: gravitation, i.e., general relativity.
We can do much better, but we must start again nearly from scratch using first and foremost General Relativity, plus Electromagnetism, the well-tested parts of Quantum Mechanics, and Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (including deterministic chaos and fractal geometry).
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