The Standard Model of particle physics is wrong on multiple counts

The Standard Model of particle physics is said to be the most successful scientific theory ever. That’s what Quanta Magazine said, and plenty of other people say much the same thing. New Scientist called it a scientific masterpiece. Modern physics dot org called it a pillar of modern physics. Space dot com said it was one of the most successful scientific theories of all time. CERN said it’s “one of the most successful theories in physics”. It’s a common theme. Case Western physicist Glenn Starkman called it The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything. Former Harvard physicist Matt Strassler called it The Astonishing Standard Model. Northwestern physicist Gerald Gabrielse talked about The standard model’s greatest triumph.

The Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions chart, from the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP)

As for what the Standard Model is, I think the Wikipedia article gives a fair description. There’s also a Wikipedia article called the Mathematical formulation of the Standard Model. You may like the Standard Model article in Glenn Elert’s Physics Hypertextbook. In addition there’s a CERN article, a WorldAtlas article, a DoE article, a Britannica article, an Institute of Physics article, a Live Science article and many more. Such as the 1998 paper by Mary Gaillard, Paul Grannis, and Frank Sciulli called The Standard Model of Particle Physics. Or the 2005 paper by Guido Altarelli called The Standard Model of Particle Physics. Or the 2014 paper by Tom Kibble called The Standard Model of Particle Physics. If you want something lightweight try Don Lincoln’s 8-minute YouTube video. If you want something more substantial try An Introduction to the Standard Model of Particle Physics. That’s a 272-page book by Noel Cottingham and Derek Greenwood from the University of Bristol.

The Standard Model is a combination of two theories

Like Brittanica says, the Standard Model is a combination of two theories, namely electroweak theory, and quantum chromodynamics. It also says both of these theories are gauge field theories, which “describe the interactions between particles in terms of the exchange of intermediary ‘messenger’ particles”. Like Wikipedia says, there’s the quantum chromodynamics sector and the electroweak sector, but there’s also the Higgs sector and the and the Yukawa sector. Both of these are part of electroweak theory. As per Emmanuel Paschos’ book on Electroweak Theory, the latter “unifies two basic forces of nature: the weak force and electromagnetism”. Wikipedia also says the Standard Model has 19 free parameters and “seventeen distinct particles – twelve fermions and five bosons”.

Public domain Standard Model particles image by Cush, see Wikimedia Commons

On top of that it says flavor and color combinations along with antimatter, means that the fermions and bosons feature 48 and 13 variations respectively. So that’s 61 “elementary” particles in all. In addition Wikipedia says the Standard Model’s fundamental objects are quantum fields, and that particles are excited states of these fields. It also says the Standard Model describes three of the four known fundamental forces, namely electromagnetic, weak, and strong, but excludes gravity.

Einstein explained how gravity works

The exclusion of gravity is an issue. That’s because Einstein explained how gravity works, and because general relativity is one of the best-tested theories we’ve got. Whilst Einstein said the speed of light is constant in 1905, only two years later in 1907 he was saying light curves in a gravitational field because the speed of light varies with elevation. He reiterated this year after year, in 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, and 1916. He didn’t say light follows the curvature of spacetime. Instead he said a gravitational field was a place where space was “neither homogeneous nor isotropic”. He also spoke of “the refraction of light rays by the gravitational field”. So did Newton, see Opticks query 20. He talked about a medium which grew “denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines”. A photon moving horizontally above the surface of the Earth doesn’t curve downwards because of exchange particles called gravitons. It does so because it behaves like any wave does when it encounters an orthogonal gradient in wave speed. Sonar waves typically curve downwards in the sea, and the same can happen to sound waves in the air. Ditto for waves in solids, as per seismic refraction.

The Standard Model contradicts other aspects of physics

Once you’re aware of this sort of thing, you realise the Standard Model contradicts other aspects of physics. For example the 1915 Einstein-de Haas effect “demonstrates that spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies”. And yet the Standard Model says the electron has no size and nothing is rotating. When you look further you note the wave nature of matter as demonstrated by the 1927 Davissson-Germer experiment, and the closed path mentioned by de Broglie, Schrödinger, Darwin, Born and Infeld, and Belinfante. On top of that, you appreciate that we can make an electron and a positron out of light in pair production, as demonstrated by Carl Anderson in 1932. After that you can understand why an electron falls down. The closed path has a horizontal and a vertical component, and the horizontal component curves down a little. Hence the electron is displaced downwards. I can show it best if I use light in a square path, which makes it clear why the deflection of light is twice the deflection of matter:

After that you start to notice that the Standard Model doesn’t just contradict other aspects of physics, it even contradicts itself. The electron is said to be an excitation of a quantum field, but it’s also said to be a point particle. The Dirac equation is a wave equation that is said to describe the electron, but The Introduction to the Standard Model says the electron “is still thought to be a structureless point particle”. How can this be?

It delivers no concept of what a photon is

The answer is that it can’t. There are other examples. The photon has an energy E, a frequency f,  and a wavelength λ, such that E=hf and E=hc/λ, where h is Planck’s constant of action and c is the speed of light. However The Introduction to the Standard Model says nothing about Planck’s constant, and nothing about photon frequency or wavelength. Whilst it gives a section on the “intrinsic” angular momentum of the photon, it delivers no concept of what a photon is. An excitation of the photon field just doesn’t cut it. Presumably that’s why we have a 2008 book edited by Chandra Roychoudhuri,‎ Al Kracklauer, and‎ Kathy Creath called The Nature of Light: What is a photon? It contains 27 essays on the subject. My takeaway was that the photon is an electromagnetic soliton, a circularly polarized or twisted sinusoidal wave in space that does not disperse. However the internet is full of Standard Model pundits telling you the photon is a point particle, despite E=hf and E=hc/λ, despite the diffraction and refraction of light, despite pair production, and despite the wave nature of matter. And despite the fact that Pascual Jordan resolved the wave-particle duality of light way back in 1925, in the famous Dreimännerarbeit paper. He said light quanta, which were called photons from 1926, are waves. That’s why the double slit experiment does what it does.

The photon-photon interaction, which is very strong, doesn’t feature in QED

It gets worse, because there’s a huge issue in quantum electrodynamics (QED) concerning pair production. It dates back to Dirac’s 1931 paper Quantised singularities in the electromagnetic field. That’s where Dirac said this: “An encounter between two hard γ–rays (of energy at least half a million volts) could lead to the creation simultaneously of an electron and anti-electron”. This is known as two-photon physics, or gamma-gamma pair production, and is typified by the Breit-Wheeler process dating from 1934. It was performed indirectly at SLAC in 1997, and it’s the inverse of electron-positron annihilation:

Image copyright © Addison-Wesley, retrieved from J Imamura / U of Oregon

What happens is that two gamma photons, with energies of at least 511keV apiece, interact to create an electron and a positron. However this photon-photon interaction, which is very strong, doesn’t feature in QED. Presumably that’s why the HEP group at UCL said this: “From Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) we know that photons cannot couple directly to each other, since they don’t carry charge, but they can interact through higher order processes: a photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a charged fermion/anti-fermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple”. That’s flat out wrong. A 511keV photon doesn’t fluctuate into a 511keV electron and a 511keV positron. That’s in breach of conservation of energy. In similar vein a 511keV electron and a 511keV positron do not fluctuate back into a single 511keV photon. That’s in breach of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. In addition a photon travels at the speed of light, whilst electrons and positrons don’t. So if a photon did somehow manage to fluctuate into a fermion pair and back again, it couldn’t be travelling at the speed of light. The bottom line is that this is a “lies to children” attempt to cover up a serious flaw in quantum electrodynamics. It describes all phenomena involving electrically charged particles interacting by means of exchange of photons. It doesn’t work for photons interacting with photons, or for a photon interacting with itself.

The exchange-particle idea worked its way into QED from the mid-1930s, even though Heisenberg used a neutron model that was later retracted

It doesn’t work for other things. For example back in 1926 Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck gained fame for their discovery of electron spin. Their paper on spinning electrons and the structure of spectra was published in Nature. Llewellyn Thomas followed up with a paper on the motion of the spinning electron. He talked about “the precession of the spin axis in an external magnetic field”. The electron goes round in circles in a uniform magnetic field because of Larmor precession. It’s analogous to the gyroscopic precession of a boomerang. The positron goes round the other way like a left-handed boomerang. Their circular motions are not caused by photons flashing back and forth. It’s like Cathryn Carson said in the peculiar notion of exchange forces, the exchange-particle idea worked its way into QED from the mid-1930s, even though Heisenberg used a neutron model that was later retracted. There’s an exchange of sorts in for example Compton scattering. The frequency of the incident photon is reduced, and you can reason that the interaction somehow takes a slice off that photon and applies it to the electron, making it asymmetrical. As a result, the electron moves. But there are no photons popping in and out of existence, spontaneously, like worms from mud. Those exchange photons are virtual, and virtual photons only exist in the mathematics of the model.

Electrons and positrons don’t move the way that they do because they’re throwing photons back and forth

The same applies to the circular and linear motion in positronium. Positronium is a short-lived exotic atom made up of both matter and antimatter, namely and electron and a positron. It is sometimes described as light hydrogen. The electron and the positron move around one another and towards one another before they annihilate to gamma photons. Why do they move around another and towards one another? Because the electromagnetic interaction results in linear electric motion and rotational magnetic motion. Because of the screw nature of electromagnetism. It’s why we have Ampère’s right hand screw rule. James Clerk Maxwell spoke of it in On Physical Lines of Force in 1861. His subtitle was The Theory of Molecular Vortices. He said “a motion of translation along an axis cannot produce a rotation about that axis unless it meets with some special mechanism, like that of a screw”. Hermann Minkowski’s also referred to it in 1908 paper Space and Time. Towards the end, near figure 3, he said this: “In the description of the field caused by the electron itself, then it will appear that the division of the field into electric and magnetic forces is a relative one with respect to the time-axis assumed; the two forces considered together can most vividly be described by a certain analogy to the force-screw in mechanics; the analogy is, however, imperfect”. As far as I can tell it’s like gravitomagnetism, where there’s a space-time vortex around the Earth and space is twisted. So electrons and positrons don’t move the way that they do because they’re throwing photons back and forth. They move the way they do because each is a chiral dynamical “spinor”. Because a spinor does what it says on the tin, and because counter-rotating vortices attract and co-rotating vortices repel:

CCASA positronium image by Manticorp, caption “An electron and positron orbiting around their common centre of mass”. Spinor motion image by me

The evidence is all there. We make electrons and positrons out of light, we can refract them and diffract them, they have a magnetic moment, the opposite chirality, their spins precess in a magnetic field, and when we annihilate them we get the light back. There are no magical mysterious creation and annihilation operators. Just light changing direction. See the 2014 essay on the fluid dynamics of James Clerk Maxwell by Henry Keith Moffat. In his 1867 letter to Peter Guthrie Tait, Maxwell said the simplest indivisible whorl would be a worble embracing itself. Nowadays we could call it a trivial knot. But sadly Maxwell died before his time, Thomson and Tait were ahead of their time with their vortex atoms and their knot theory, and the Standard Model still employs Yakov Frenkel’s point-particle electron. See Frenkel’s 1926 paper on the electrodynamics of rotating electrons, which said “the electron will thus be treated simply as a point”.

Renormalization was merely a kludge to fix the problem of infinities

It’s as if Standard Model physicists have never read about the history, and just don’t appreciate that renormalization was merely a kludge to fix the problem of infinities caused by the point-particle electron. See Robert Oppenheimer’s 1930 paper On the theory of electrons and protons. The correct solution was to pay attention to pair production, to the wave nature of matter, and to Schrödinger and the quantum realists, and then model the electron properly: as an electromagnetic wave in a chiral spin ½ spinor configuration. I think the best way to get a handle on this is to form a flat-based sinusoidal paper strip into a double loop with a half twist:

Strip images by me, GNUFDL spinor image by Slawkb, see Wikipedia

Slide the two ends past one another until you’ve got a Möbius strip that looks like a spinor. Apply Sellotape and take a look at what you’ve got. The minima and maxima combine along with all points between to give you something that’s the same all round. Photons and electrons aren’t flat strips of course, but this gets you to first base. It tells you that electron mass is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave in a closed path, which is why the inertia of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It also tells you why matter can never move at the speed of light. In addition it tells you that charge is topological, and that the electron’s electromagnetic field is really just a zitterbewegung electromagnetic wave in a closed spin ½ path. Standing wave, standing field.

We thought of QED in 1949 as a temporary and jerry-built structure

However quantum electrodynamics doesn’t cover this. It doesn’t include any element of topological quantum field theory. It doesn’t include the screw nature of electromagnetism. It doesn’t pay attention to Maxwell’s speed-of-light expression now written as c = 1/√(ε₀μ₀), or to Einstein who said the speed of light is spatially variable, which means gravity has a secret electromagnetic nature. It doesn’t even tell you how a magnet works. See Bruno Maddox’s 2008 Discover magazine article Three Words That Could Overthrow Physics: “What Is Magnetism?” The subtitle is “The standard model still doesn’t describe magnets’ spooky action at a distance”. It’s true. Richard Feynman famously could not explain how a magnet worked. Something else that’s true is what Oliver Consa said. QED is said to be an amazingly accurate theory, but the theorists adjusted their calculations six times to match successive experimental results. Consa also quotes Freeman Dyson saying this in 2006: “As one of the inventors of QED, I remember that we thought of QED in 1949 as a temporary and jerry-built structure, with mathematical inconsistencies and renormalized infinities swept under the rug. We did not expect it to last more than 10 years before some more solidly built theory would replace it. Now, 57 years have gone by and that ramshackle structure still stands”.

Physicists used it as a template for another ramshackle structure called quantum chromodynamics

Dyson said QED was a ramshackle structure, whilst Feynman said QED was “the jewel of physics – our proudest possession”. That’s not good. Especially since physicists used QED as a template for another ramshackle structure called quantum chromodynamics. Even though they didn’t understand the electron, or why it had mass and charge and a g-factor of circa -2.002. As to why, having read the history, I think it’s because they got sucked into the particle “zoo” hype, and didn’t notice that they were cataloguing ephemera. It’s like they were studying firework explosions to try to learn how to make gunpowder. They didn’t notice that the only stable massive particles that had been observed were electrons and protons and their antiparticles. Hence instead of focussing on the proton, they tried to cover every last “resonance” they’d ever seen. Hence they introduced a new type of particle called a quark with the same spin ½ as the electron but with a fractional charge of -⅓e or ⅔e. Once you’ve got some understanding of the electron, you know this can’t be right. In addition they introduced the concept of color charge. But since nobody has ever seen a free quark, or any other particle with color charge, they also introduced the concept of color confinement. Neat trick. There’s said to be three color charges called red, green, and blue, plus three opposite color charges called anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue. Thence “unlike electric charge, color charge is never observed in nature: in all cases, red, green, and blue (or anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue) or any color and its anti-color combine to form a color-neutral system”. I find it amazing that anybody ever fell for this.

The proton as described today does not match the original quark model

In addition they introduced 8 types of massless messenger particles called gluons, which convey color charge and an anti-color magnetic moment, even though they have the same spin 1 as the photon. On top of that came the concept of asymptotic freedom where quarks inside a proton behaved as if they were free, and where “the variation in a physical coupling constant under changes of scale can be understood qualitatively as coming from the action of the field on virtual particles”. This “discovery was instrumental in ‘rehabilitating’ quantum field theory”. How very convenient. It allegedly works because virtual quark-antiquark pairs screen the color charge field, whilst virtual gluons augment it and change its color. Only guess what? All the gluons in an ordinary hadron are virtual. As in not real. Not only that, but the proton is said to consists of 3 valence quarks plus “sea quarks” which pop in and out of existence. They’re virtual too. Which means the proton as described today does not match the original quark model. Not only that, but the proton spin crisis undermines the quark model. Especially since “Monte Carlo calculations have shown that 50% of the proton spin comes from gluon polarization”. Even though those gluons are virtual, as in not real. Sigh. Something else that undermines the quark model is the fact that we can annihilate a proton with an antiproton to yield two photons. We’re more likely to see pions and kaons, but these decay quickly into photons, neutrinos, and electrons and positrons, which could be annihilated to photons. So the lowest-common-denominator particles are photons and neutrinos. We never see quarks and gluons. To this day nobody has ever seen a free quark or a free gluon. Which is presumably why the late Michael Atiyah spoke of the trefoil proton. The trefoil is the next knot in the knot zoo after the trivial knot. lt’s tricolourable, just like the typical proton depiction:

 CCASA image by Arpad Horvath see Wikipedia Public domain image by Jim Belk, see Wikipedia

The proton has the same charge as a positron, and the same spin ½. You can diffract protons, so the proton has a wave nature just like an electron. Since protons do not move at c, you can reason that as per the electron, the wave is in a closed path. On top of that the g-factor of 5.585 tells you the closed path is circa three times as complex as the electron’s. On top of that, you can trace around the trefoil anticlockwise from the bottom left calling out the crossing-over directions: up down up. How cool is that? The bottom line is that once you have some understanding of the electron, you come to appreciate that quantum chromodynamics is seriously flawed too.

This was Steven Weinberg’s a model of leptons, which was nothing of the sort

It gets worse. The weak interaction is said to be responsible for beta decay, wherein a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. It began with James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in 1932, thence a 1933 paper by Francis Perrin. Perrin talked about a massless spin ½ neutrino which moved at the speed of light, which “would be more analogous to the photon than an electron”. If you’ve read papers like Williamson and van der Mark’s Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?, that sounds like good stuff. However things went downhill with Hideki Yukawa’s 1935 paper on the interaction of elementary particles. He introduced a U-field “in analogy to the scalar potential of the electromagnetic field”, but which decreased more rapidly with distance. He said “this field should be accompanied by a new sort of quantum, just as the electromagnetic field is accompanied by the photon”. This was the first mention of what was to become the W boson:

Based on an image in Fermi and the theory of the weak interactions by G Rajasekaran

Then after a long chequered history, electroweak theory was born in 1967, in what’s called the electroweak unification paper. This was Steven Weinberg’s A model of leptons, which was nothing of the sort. Weinberg started by saying “leptons interact only with photons” which is wrong. Something else he got wrong was his reference to electron-neutron scattering. He should have said electron-neutrino scattering. Weinberg also talked of isospin T, isospin being the flawed notion that the proton and neutron were two isospin states of the same particle. On top of that he spoke of hypercharge Y without knowing what charge was. He also talked about a spin-zero doublet “whose vacuum expectation value will break T and Y and give the electron its mass”. It’s clear that he wasn’t familiar with the mass of body is a measure of its energy-content. He also talked about symmetry as if it was sacred, but adopted “broken symmetry” because the short-range Goldstone bosons couldn’t be massless. He was talking about what’s now known as the Higgs field, aka Weinberg’s toilet, and made a great virtue out of renormalizability. The paper is one of the most cited in physics, but it’s dripping with issues. Nevertheless, eventually came the “discovery” of the W and Z particles at CERN in 1983. See the 2003 physicsworld article Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z by Gary Taubes. Taubes tells how Rubbia sold the “discovery” of the W boson to a willing audience at CERN in January 1983. He got a standing ovation, even though what had actually been observed was a high-energy electron. It was a similar story for the Z boson.

How on Earth can an 80 MeV particle be anything to do with the decay of a 938MeV particle?

The W and Z bosons are said to be mediators of the electroweak interaction, which is said to be settled science. It is said that the W-boson is involved in neutron decay, but how on Earth can an 80 MeV particle be anything to do with the decay of a 938MeV particle? It can’t. The reason why is right there in the history. See the discovery of the neutron on the Nobel website. It mentions Ernest Rutherford who knew that an element’s atomic number, the number of protons, was circa half the atomic weight. So in 1920 he suggested that this disparity was due to neutral particles called neutrons. The evidence of beta decay suggested that there were electrons within the nucleus, so Rutherford thought of the neutron as a close-coupled proton-electron combination. However problems arose with this idea. For example nitrogen-14 was an integer-spin atom so it couldn’t be made up of fourteen spin ½ protons and seven spin ½ electrons. That was before Pauli proposed the neutrino in 1931 to fix the spin statistics.

The neutron has charge

Skip past that to Chadwick’s 1933 Royal Society Bakerian lecture. On page 2 he said this: “the collision of a neutron with an atomic nucleus, although much more frequent than with an electron, is also a rare event, for the electric field between a neutron and a nucleus is small except at distances of the order of 10^-12 cm”. Chadwick was saying that whilst the neutron is neutral, when you get up close, it isn’t. This is why it has a magnetic moment. See Chadwick’s 1935 Nobel lecture: “the first suggestion of a neutral particle with the properties of the neutron, we now know, was made by Rutherford in 1920. He thought that a proton and an electron might unite in a much more intimate way than they do in the hydrogen atom, and so form a particle of no nett charge and with a mass nearly the same as that of the hydrogen atom”. The neutron has no net charge, but the neutron has charge. Not only that, but its charge distribution matches the nuclear force:

Nuclear force plot from the Dux college HSC physics course, neutron charge distribution by Dru Renner inverted by me

How do we create a neutron? Via electron capture, where a neutrino is emitted to conserve angular momentum. And how does electron capture actually work? I think it does what it says on the tin, and it’s electromagnetic. The electron is captured. It’s pulled into the proton, like an unfortunate worker in a steel mill is pulled into the rollers. It becomes wrapped around the proton. Or close-coupled if you prefer.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics isn’t just wrong on multiple counts, it’s all wrong

Beta decay is the opposite of electron capture. So it’s electromagnetic too. The electron usually stays captured in a proton-rich nucleus, tied down by the surrounding protons. But relocate the neutron into a neutron-rich nucleus, or kick it out of a nucleus altogether, and the electron does not stay captured. A single proton is not enough to keep it close-coupled. It resumes its original configuration and is fired out at relativistic speed, so the force in play isn’t weak, it’s strong. An antineutrino is emitted too, again conserving angular momentum. We just don’t need a massive 80GeV W boson for this. Nor do we need a Higgs mechanism to give the W boson its mass. So where does that leave us? With an electron field that’s just the photon field with a trivial knot hitch. With a Yukawa’s U-field that isn’t an analogy of the electromagnetic field, it is the electromagnetic field. And so it goes. Modelling the nuclear force via pion exchange has always been a disaster. Quantum gravity is a fool’s errand. The neutrino is more like the photon than the electron. There are no quarks. There are no gluons. There are no 80GeV bosons popping in and out of existence. Spontaneously, like worms from mud. Charge is not fundamental, and nor are electrons. Change the name of the proton to the antiproton and see what happens to the mystery of the missing antimatter. And for the cherry on top, the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content, because E=mc² isn’t wrong. Which means the Higgs mechanism is. As for all the particle “discoveries”, that’s one for another day. Meanwhile, and all in all, it means the Standard Model of particle physics isn’t just wrong on multiple counts. It’s all wrong. All of it.