#Standard model particles plus#

It does not explain why neutrinos have mass. For all its success, the Standard Model does not answer the question of what the dark matter and dark energy are that make up the majority of matter in our universe. You don’t worry about things like that unless the predictions are incredibly spot on.Īnd yet, despite its robust predictions, the consensus was that today’s Standard Model is not the final one. So precise are its predictions that physicists who rely on it at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, have to be alert to incredibly mundane effects like trains passing by miles away, because they set up electrical fields in the rails that can affect measurements at the giant accelerator’s detectors.

“It’s gorgeous!” said David Gross (Nobel laureate, 2004, for his work on the strong force that binds atomic nuclei,) beaming like a proud father at the written equation that encapsulates the model. But there is, and it explains all matter on all scales, from the tiniest Planck length ( 6.3631×10 −34 inch) to the scale of the universe. As noted by Gerard t’Hooft (Nobel laureate, 1999), no one knew in the 1960s, when he did his own seminal work in electroweak theory, that there would be something as comprehensive as the model turned out to be. The first thing to emphasize is that the Standard Model is well worth celebrating. If you wanted to take stock of the Standard Model’s place in physics, and meet some physics icons of the past century, this was undoubtedly the place to do it. Titled “The Standard Model at 50,” the meeting was in part a celebration, in part a time to reflect and in part a time to ponder the future. To celebrate, eight of these Nobel laureates, along with dozens of other preeminent scientists, gathered for a special symposium over the weekend of June 1–4, 2018 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Weinberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work, but no fewer than 54 other physicists have also won the prize for their research into aspects of the Standard Model.

#Standard model particles plus#

And three of the four fundamental forces of nature-electromagnetism, plus the weak and the strong nuclear force-have all been shown to be manifestations of one underlying force as part of the Standard Model. The masses of those particles lie within 1 percent of the theoretical value anticipated by the model. All the particles it predicted to exist have been found, including most recently the Higgs boson. Hailed by many since then as the most successful theory ever conceived, the Standard Model describes the universe with a comprehensiveness that is hard to understate. Just over a half-century ago, the physicist Steven Weinberg published a seminal paper titled “ A Model of Leptons in the journal Physical Review Letters.” It was just three pages long, but its contents were revolutionary: in the paper, Weinberg outlined the core of the theory now known as the Standard Model, which governs elementary particles.