Every time physicists find a new particle, the Standard Model gets one step closer to becoming a Super Model.
There’s always talk of whether the new arrival fits in, or stands out, or matches the model’s predictions. Everything gets related back to this “Bible of quantum physics”.
The Standard Model isn’t mystical, however. It’s purely, beautifully mathematical.
Yet for all its predictive power, it’s not perfect — it can’t explain gravity, dark matter or dark energy. The real goal of particle-smashing physicists is to break it.
Only by finding new particles that weren’t predicted by the Standard Model, and can’t fit inside it, will we move to a new and improved model — one that doesn’t have big gaps where gravity and the dark parts of physics should be.
The Standard Model explained
Forty years ago scientists pulled everything they knew about quantum physics into one massive equation — the Standard Model of particle physics.