Uh, no. It was a joke that I thought would be illuminating. My point was that a theory can have all sorts of incredibly precise predictions yet be based on a totally bogus foundation as long as you generate enough rules.
A less facetious example would be fourier analysis of a given waveform. Now, I can say that the waveform is composed of an infinite set of sine waves with appropriate amplitudes and phases. I can set up filters that will apparently "extract" particular sine waves out of this set. I can do all sorts of wonderful computations and design circuits based on this, too. But is a waveform actually made of an infinite set of sine waves? Nope, it has a single value at a given point. In fact, when I thought I was extracting a particular sine wave by using a filter, I was actually only seeing the response of that filter to the waveform. In other words, the mathematical representation had nothing to do with what was going on physically.
You are confusing two expressions of the waveform here. If you limit yourself to sine waves (as in Fourier) analysis, you need an infinite set of such waves. On the other hand, you still need an infinite number of digits to describ the value at a point. These are only two different descriptions of the same object.
Other "flaws" of the Standard Model: "this theory does not explain the symmetries on which it is based, uses a number of 19 arbitrary parameters which are not derived from any theory (which received empirical values)," does not explain gravity, and has no mechanism to account for the masses of elementary particles. It "does not allow" neutrinos to have mass; but today there is some experimental evidence of the mass of neutrinos, "perhaps 10^-2 eV. It is also known that the photon in specified conditions may have a non-zero rest mass (Vigier's theory)...."
Steven Weinberg is quoted as saying that the unified theory of all four forces "will probably not be possible without radically new ideas."
Superstring/supersymmetry theories have been proposed that seek to unify the four forces; they invoke the idea of "hyperspace" -- 10 space dimensions, and one of time. Under this scenario, elementary particles are not point-like in space, but have spatial extension -- having the dimension of Planck length 10^-33 cm. They note, "at such dimensions, 'space-time cannot be treated as a classical continuum'...and needs a quantum interpretation."
But as the authors of this paper observe, "the reality of superstrings was not experimentally proved and it is not sure that can be experimentally proved in a direct way. The theory of superstrings does not say [what] is the origin of of superstrings." They observe such a structural theory "neglects the phenomenological."
Then they note -- suggesting a possible link to the phenomenological -- "the non-locality of quantum processes in the universe is a strong argument for an underlying deep reality out of space and time.... It us evident that the structural science has arrived at the frontier of deep reality, which is outside of space and time, and has opened the doors of a realm of reality in which phenomenological processes become predominant. This level of reality is the source of all that is phenomenological, and also is the source of the deep energy used and formed by phenomenological information in to strings, membranes or elementary particles."
They add, "The phenomenological is always present in all reality of the universe either in a closed or an intro-open way.... In general, structural science may be seen as only a first approximation to the more general structural-phenomenological science."
All of which strikes me as being perfectly fascinating...for the phenomenonological is "beyond" or "behind" events taking place in space-time. The Higgs field may be the next substrate to be authenticated; but it seems to me that the "realm" of the phenomenological will not be found "in it," but still "behind it."
It will be interesting to see what the scientific community will do with these authors' insights (if anything).