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0 pointsJumpCrisscross1y ago0 comments

You’re acting like the SM is an unfalsifiable string theory that just revises all of its parameter every time the last batch is disproven. It’s not.

SM is not fully developed. And we know where it is wrong or painfully silent, e.g. neutrinos and gravity. But it’s a rigorous theory, possibly the most rigorous our species has ever developed, with central tenets that have held to ridiculous levels of precision. Of course there are conflicting hypotheses at its frontier. That’s sort of what defines the frontier. But at its core, the SM is robust. So robust that we mostly don’t talk about it, obsessing—as science should—with the parts where it doesn’t fit together as perfectly.

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staunton1y ago· 1 in thread

I'm saying that the standard model is evolving and there's no authority or institution that gets to definine what "the standard model" means. All of this is completely reasonable.

Maybe it can evolve forever to accommodate new results (e.g. by adding new fields), likely it can't (it's hard to imagine a reasonable modification for breaking CPT symmetry, not that this is the best example). If at any point noone can figure out how to evolve it before a radically different theory emerges to explain current discrepancies, we'll have what Kuhn might call a "paradigm shift", say "the standard model is falsified", and invent a different name for the new theory. I even included this possibility in my original comment, so I'm not sure what gave you offense...

That's completely unrelated to any given instance of this evolution being falsifiable. Each of them is, they stick around for a while and there aren't that many. All very proper, Popper is happy.

Meanwhile, string theory hasn't produced a single prediction that was later observed experimentally and one can even argue whether it has produced any predictions at all...

JumpCrisscrossOP1y ago

> the standard model is evolving and there's no authority or institution that gets to definine what "the standard model" means

The standard model per se is not materially evolving. We're bolting extensions onto it. And there is disagreement over what those extensions mean, whether they're true, and what free parameters they may add.

> Maybe it can evolve forever to accommodate new results (e.g. by adding new fields)

The Higgs field was the last field to have been "added" to the model. Its existence wasn't prompted by experimentation, but vice versa.

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