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Thank you for your reply!

Oh, please. How many revisions of the Standard Model have there been in the past 100 years?

The Standard Model of quantum field theory is a very successful theory that describes the universe as being made up of six types of quarks and six types of leptons bound together by three fundamental forces: strong, weak and electromagnetic. However, the model is incomplete because (a) it does not consider gravity and (b) the Higgs field/boson which ought to account for “matter” in the model is not yet observed.

Quarks and leptons are members of the family of particles called fermions, come in pairs and are each divided into three generations. Force carriers are the intermediate vector bosons which transmit the three fundamental forces through which matter interacts. The gluon handles the strong atomic force. The photon handles the electromagnetic force. And the W and Z bosons handle the weak force.

The Standard Model works beautifully as long as the physicists add the Higgs field/boson particle to the quarks and leptons. The bottom line is that nobody has been able to make a Higgs or see one and thus the Standard Model might fail for absence of evidence.

The indirect effects of the Higgs (or whatever it might be) include the connection of the mass of the W boson to those of the quarks. The top quark, with a large mass, has a detectable impact on the W whose magnitude of impact depends on the (yet unobserved) Higgs. Without it, the W’s mass would be significantly lower.

But even if we find the Higgs, all the mysteries are not solved. Whereas the Standard Model would be self-consistent, it would make the Higgs mass very large whereas the indirect evidence is that it is not large. The Standard Model itself would still have no particles to explain dark matter or dark energy – it would only address ordinary matter, the 5% of the critical density of the universe.

The answer may lie in the supersymmetry theory of which the Standard Model would be one part. In this model each particle has a corresponding superparticle with a greater mass. As the theory goes, the superparticles which remained after the big bang form the remaining critical density of the universe.

Strangely, because of the capabilities of the accelerators we currently have – it may well be that we are able to prove the superparticles before the Higgs boson (because superparticles have a greater mass).

Even now physicists often refer the standard model in past tense – preferring to concentrate on supersymmetry or higher dimensionality as Physicist remarked on The mysteries of mass, post 17

“Try this: take a bunch of massless, interacting particles and let them fly around in three dimensions, crashing into each other and bouncing off as they may. Now take their trajectories, and project them onto a two-dimensional plane. As viewed in the two-dimensional plane, the particles interact as if they had masses, the apparent masses being proportional to their momenta in the direction perpendicular to the plane. [the extra dimension]

It is possible that the particles we see are all actually massless, their apparent masses corresponding to extra-dimensional momentum components we can't as yet detect.”

To this I would add P.S. Wesson's 5 Dimensions, 2 Times