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How does the fact that we need a small modification to the Standard Model to account for Neutrino masses contradict what I said?
by Certhas 6y ago
How does the fact that we need a small modification to the Standard Model to account for Neutrino masses contradict what I said?
- btilly 6y agoYou claimed a complete understanding of the fundamental properties of every kind of matter we have done terrestrial physics on. But we still don't have a complete understanding of the properties of neutrinos, nor a definitive understanding of how to properly tweak the Standard Model to include them. They are the only area of particle physics where experimental evidence did not fit the Standard Model, and therefore evidence of that discrepancy should be no more ignored than the failure of attempts to measure ether dragging should have been in Rutherford's day.
- Certhas 6y agoI claimed fundamental principles, not fundamental properties. :) I think there are a number of ways to add neutrino mass to the standard model without introducing new principles. But this is at the end just semantics. We don't know by which mechanism neutrinos gain mass yet. We don't know any number of things about non-terrestrial observations. There clearly is plenty of physics to discover. But it's easy to underestimate the discrepancy to Kelvins days. When he made that statement the existence of electrons had not yet been discovered. Atomism was something coming out of chemistry, not out of physics, and at the close of the 19th century time it was still possible to doubt the reality of atoms. You focus on ether dragging, but in fact it was not understood what the mirrors Michelson used were made of, or how they got their reflective properties.