an open letter to the standard model
Dear Standard Model, we need to talk. Now, now, don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not that you are not doing your job well, in fact the exact opposite is what we want to address. It may sound odd that a number of scientists are getting frustrated when they can’t seem to break you, but look at the situation from their angle. For physics to take a huge leap forward, it needs to outgrow you, much like general relativity was the next iteration of Newtonian physics, and like neo-Darwinian synthesis combined genetics and natural selection for evolutionary research to advance in new and meaningful directions. But before we can start working on your eventual replacement, we’ll need to discover your shortfalls, something outside of your predictive power. And right now, the sad truth is that we can’t. We’re desperately stuck and are looking for a way out.
The last attempt even used particles with exotic quark alignments, neutral B mesons, to trigger the decay of the heavy top quark into a muon/anti-muon pair, or a matter/anti-matter pair with an electron’s husky cousins. The idea was to smash them and show enough such pairs forming out of the debris to exceed your limit on them. Sadly, that refused to happen. Not only were the decays in ranges described by you, but so much within them that we can’t even hint at possibly breaking you with another attempt. All hopes are on the huge power boost to the Large Hadron Collider to maybe, just maybe, create a decay path or a particle debris cloud you can’t explain, giving scientists a peek at what lies beyond the world in your framework, and possible solutions to the paradoxes and mysteries that still exist. Although you’re supremely helpful and were one of the biggest scientific triumphs of the last century, now you’re actually holding us back.
Again, this isn’t a grudge. We like you and we’ll still have work for you. But science can’t simply coast on what it has already accomplished, it must find answers to questions that still loom long after a discovery is made, or better yet, introduced by a discovery. Regardless of what all those misguided postmodernist sophists preach, science thrives on disproving itself and finding out an axiom is actually wrong or woefully incomplete. Overthrowing and improving existing theories or introducing brand new ones is how we advance and what wins Nobel Prizes. And we won’t hold ourselves down just because you won’t break today or even tomorrow. There will be a day we will pass your limitations as the media across the world will declare that the hunt for your future iteration is now on. Because you see, we know there has to be something more laying beneath you, we know there has to so we can explain the anomalies with which bleeding edge work has to be peppered. And we will break you to find it. Nothing personal. It’s just science.
