This is a good article, but I think it's a little confusing -- it doesn't specify the scope of the bootstrap programme. It's true that general considerations c

This is a good article, but I think it's a little confusing -- it doesn't specify the scope of the bootstrap programme. It's true that general considerations can give you very strong constraints on how particles of various spins can interact. For example, it's been known for decades that at low energies, massless spin 1 particles inevitably give you Yang-Mills and massless spin 2 particles inevitably give you general relativity. There is also a separate idea called the conformal bootstrap which seeks to use general principles to pin down everything about a theory, but my impression is that it only works well for simple conformal field theories in lower dimensions. In particular, these ideas don't tell you anything about the detailed structure of the Standard Model: why it has the gauge groups it does, why there are 6 quarks, the values of the quark masses, how the spontaneous symmetry breaking works, the gauge couplings, and so on. That's the way with almost all theoretical tools: the flashier and more general in scope they are, the less details they actually pin down. So while formal theorists may be excited about this, experimentalists can't really use it for anything.