The discovery of the Higss boson and nothing else outside the Standard Model at the LHC is the worst-case scenario: we now have a theory of everything that predicts nothing...
The standard model is basically a list of correctly working theories, taped together like the monster of Frankenstein.
Nobody likes it. It's ugly as hell. Physicists, dreaming of some perfect symmetry driving the universe forwards all recoil in horror. Everybody thinks ot must be possible to make something better.
Problem is, the monster works. After tuning a short list of parameters, it survives everything we can throw at it. We have trouble calculating the consequences, but that's not a failing of the model
This a a pretty reaching take. The standard model has lots of short comings and definitely doesn't survive everything we throw at it, namely gravity and likewise general relativity.
If vacuum is meta-stable it is possible for entirely different set of fields to exist instead, but the gravity would be the same, I guess. This makes it outside of standard model.
It predicts things we’ve already observed, sure. But we came up with the standard model after seeing what ideas worked and which ones didn’t, and we get to amend it every time an experiment shows us something new.
The standard model isn’t some single theory that was devised and survived testing. It’s an amalgam of various ideas which have survived experimental verification. It’s a bit hollow IMO to say it “predicts” things. It’s a bit like drawing the dartboard after throwing the darts.
It predicts much more than what has been put in. The SM has 22 free parameters. I agree that if it predicted exactly 22 data points it'd be a pointless encoding of what was put in. But it predicts thousands and thousands of data points, some to twelve decimal points.
It predicts things as-yet-unseen, also, such as detailed proton structure, precision atomic matrix elements, detailed nuclear structure and decay rates, and so on.
Neutrinos were predicted and discovered long before the standard model.
Note that the standard model did NOT predict neutrino mass. Though it did predict that neutrino mass would explain the shortfall of observed neutrinos from the Sun.
The standard model is far from a 'theory of everything'. To name but a few problems:
* gravity
* massive neutrinos
* dark matter
* dark energy
It is also a highly parameterised model tuned to fit the data.
The biggest concern is whether we can realistically probe the failings of the standard model using a collider at ~TeV scale? If that is the case, then the standard model may be the best model of particle physics we will ever achieve.
But yeah, I agree that the "highly parameterized" part is a statement from fashion, and the number of parameters is really not a good reason to try to replace the Standard Model. (There are many good reasons, but this one isn't one of them.)
Also, I am yet to see any alternative proposal with fewer parameters.
There is a philosophical discussion to be had about whether 19 physical parameters is "a lot", and another discussion about fine tuning. However, I was primarily referring to the artifical parameters that arise from doing real calculations (renormalisation scale, mass factorisation scale, PDFs etc). These plague pretty much all perturbative QCD calculations, and then particle physicists play games like varying them by a factor of 1/2 and 2 to get something that looks like error bars...
The number of SM parameters is not a lot, given the reach of the model, which is literally every physical phenomenon ever observed on Earth with enough detail, but gravity. Thousands of independent experiments, and observational data on a scale so absurdly large it's hard to state plainly. Any philosopher who wants to claim nineteen parameters is large is out of their minds!
Fine tuning, I agree, is a philosophical issue. I'm a physicist, and I don't buy it. Why does everything have to be perturbatively pleasant? Nobody promised us that.
The issue of artificial parameters is a red herring, I think. Properly computed, of course, well-defined observables are renormalization scale independent. You might have to pick a scheme/scale to do the calculation, but whatever scale dependence remains is an indication of some perturbative truncation. The continuum limit of LQCD, for example, produces real observables with no renormalization scale dependence. Hell, renormalization is not even mysterious in a computational approach.
> The standard model is far from a 'theory of everything'. To name but a few problems...
You missed a bit of detail: Reality, and The Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Granted, this is often not a popular topic of discussion (if not ~taboo), but it's actually rather important imho.
The best thing I've ever come across that illustrates the gap/difference between how materialists think about reality vs (some) "non-materialists" (in this case Tibetan Buddhist Alan Wallace) is this video....seeing the way two highly competent but very different thinkers approach the problem space is enlightening, although it might require some background in both domains to appreciate (so Alan's case doesn't appear as "woo woo").
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist (Sean Carroll)
I think you have it exactly backwards. The standard model is astonishingly good at predictions. It's just not a theory of everything. And the output from LHC has discounted some approaches to a TofE but hasn't helped to point the way to a strong candidate.
