Standard Model: Difference between revisions

|content=Thus while I can tell you what GU predicts is next, they push for a QFT calculation of energy scale to make others sound vague.

So let’s talk vague: Look at the above containments and SM quantum numbers. That’s not vague. Now ask String Theorists the SAME question...and compare.

|content=P.S. Happy to attempt to sharpen what GU can say. But not working on my own outside the community. If you want more precise predictions than I already have, I’d need access to normal resources (e.g. constructive QFT colleagues). Working outside from home it’s probably impossible.

Our universe: Derived from  SM+GR

Physics Today: “Remind me again what the internal quantum numbers are? I do [[Quantum Gravity|quantum gravity]] so it’s not something I’ve worked with since my QFT class.”

|content=I don’t think biological interstellar alien visitors using GR and the SM make much sense. So I try to have a war *inside* my own mind as to what is true. I have a genuine “Need to Know” as to whether this is BS NatSec space opera disinformation theater. Because to me, it is data.

|content=The question about where string theory stands in comparison to other approaches to quantum gravity. I think it objectively true that string theory has given lots of stuff that  is useful/foundational to cognate areas (eg QFT) than any other approach to quantum gravity. 1/n

I think this is objectively, uncontroversially true — once people have the background in theoretical physics that they understand topics like QFT on a technical level and have some real sense of the subject.

Symplectic Geometry: Hamiltonian Quantization of the SM. ]

|content=The SM withstood every experimental test apart from neutrino masses, dark matter & gravity. Explaining those needs new degrees of freedom

Besides this most effort has been put on treating the SM itself as a low energy EFT which implies new dof but is agnostic about which

40 years ago, the Standard Model was considered geometrically beautiful but mysterious. “SO(10)” was an example of how to get a 3 factor reductive Lie group and a bizarre series of internal quantum numbers to become elegant. In short, the SM was an EFT, but not a random one. It was a coherent idea that pointed the way towards its own preferred completion/extension. Oddly, String phenomenology recognized this.  

Then as the field spun off into mathematically informed medieval theology, the SM started to be seen as ugly. A random EFT without a preferred extrapolation towards its Planckian revelation. Seeing the SM as in anyway distinguished became seen as “not getting Wilson’s point” analogous to archaic views on strong reductionism.